Air Quality in Newark, New Jersey — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Newark — with free alerts the moment smoke drifts in.
AQI 18 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Newark, New Jersey is AQI 18 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 3.4 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 1 to 21. Canairy's verdict: Breathe easy.
For scale, that PM2.5 reading is below the World Health Organization's 24-hour guideline of 15 µg/m³. The WHO figure is a daily average and this is a live reading, so read it as a sense of magnitude rather than a formal exceedance — a brief spike and a bad day are not the same thing. More on the WHO guidelines
Pollen today in Newark: grass pollen is the strongest of the three at a moderate level, from Google's pollen forecast. Canairy shows the tree, grass and weed forecast beside the air reading on every plan, including the free one.
Free to download · Live data from PurpleAir & public monitors
Live PurpleAir sensor map for Newark and Jersey City, Irvington, East Orange, Elizabeth. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Newark
The sensors Canairy reads in Newark agree right now — all 5 sit in the Good band, a 20-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 1.5 mi SW | 21 | Good |
| 2.8 mi SW | 1 | Good |
| 2.8 mi SSW | 9 | Good |
| 2.9 mi WSW | 20 | Good |
| 3.9 mi N | 17 | Good |
Newark's air is shaped less by any single event than by everything the city carries for the region. Diesel trucks feeding the port and warehouses, one of the nation's busiest airports, the state's largest trash incinerator, gas power plants, and a tangle of highways all sit inside the same few square miles where people live, and the summer smog that hangs over the whole New York metro settles here too. On top of that steady load, June 2023 showed how fast an outside event can take over, when Quebec wildfire smoke pushed the city to hazardous levels.
What Canairy does for Newark
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Newark: open the windows, or keep them shut.
Smoke alerts
A push or text the moment the air crosses your threshold — and again when it clears.
A heads-up before it's bad
Trend alerts catch the air turning, so you can close up the house before the smoke settles in.
Every place you care about
Home, work, the kids' school — across Newark or across the country, on one screen.
What the air in Newark is doing next
| When | AQI | Expected air quality | Main pollutant |
|---|---|---|---|
| Today | 45 | Good | ozone |
| Tomorrow | 45 | Good | ozone |
| Monday | 40 | Good | ozone |
| Tuesday | 50 | Good | ozone |
9/4 - A stalled frontal boundary in the northeast will result in the chance for scattered showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon, along with light northwesterly winds and warm temperatures. Ozone levels drop to the good range as a result, while fine particulates are expected to remain along the good/moderate threshold statewide. 9/5 - Canadian high pressure will build into the region on Saturday, with northerly winds, lower humidity, and seasonable temperatures anticipated. As a result, air quality will return to the good category across New Jersey. 9/6 - A pleasant day is forecast for Sunday with northeasterly winds, temperatures slightly below normal, and mostly sunny skies expected. Therefore, air quality will remain the good category throughout the state. 9/7 - High pressure will remain in control on Monday, with cooler temperatures and dry conditions forecast. Air quality will remain in the good category statewide. 9/8 - Light westerly winds and mostly sunny skies are forecast for Tuesday as a cold front approaches the region. Air quality is forecast to remain in the good category statewide.
Forecast from EPA AirNow for the Northeast Urban reporting area. Canairy watches the live sensors against it and tells you when the air actually crosses your threshold, rather than leaving you to check.
The Ironbound carries the region's industry in a few square miles
The Ironbound, on Newark's east side, is one of the most burdened neighborhoods in the state. It sits alongside the Covanta trash incinerator at 183 Raymond Boulevard, the largest in New Jersey, which has collected roughly 800 air permit violations since 2004 and was fined in 2019 under the state's Air Pollution Control Act. Add gas-fired power plants, warehouses, rail yards, the heavily contaminated Passaic River, and thousands of trucks moving through the streets each day, and a working residential neighborhood ends up breathing the byproducts of the region's freight and power.
The health record reflects that. Across Newark, emergency room visits for asthma run about triple the rate for the rest of New Jersey. This is exactly why New Jersey passed its 2020 environmental justice law, which lets state regulators deny new pollution permits that would pile more onto already overburdened communities, and the Ironbound is named as one of them. For anyone living here, day-to-day air is less about the weather and more about what is running nearby.
Port and highway diesel is a daily source, not an occasional one
Newark grew up around freight. Port Newark and the Newark Liberty airport, both among the busiest on the East Coast, funnel a constant stream of diesel trucks through the city and along the I-95 and I-280 corridors that cut through it. That traffic puts out fine particulate matter and nitrogen oxides right at street level, close to homes, schools, and playgrounds rather than off in some distant industrial zone.
The federal government estimates about 31 million Americans live within three miles of a port, and Newark's neighborhoods are squarely in that group. Because this pollution comes from engines running every day, it does not spike and clear the way wildfire smoke does. It is a lower, steadier background that a live sensor near your block will pick up far better than a citywide average, which is part of why a reading from the corner nearest you tells you more than a single number for all of Newark.
Summer ozone rides in with the metro heat
Newark shares an airshed with the rest of the New York metro, and in summer that means ozone. On hot, sunny, stagnant days, tailpipe and smokestack emissions cook in the sunlight into ground-level ozone, a gas that can tighten the chest and aggravate asthma even when the sky looks perfectly clear. The American Lung Association's most recent State of the Air ranked the New York-Newark metro 12th worst in the country for ozone, with an F grade that has worsened three reports in a row.
The better news is on soot. The same report shows the metro's fine-particle pollution improving to passing grades on both the daily and year-round measures, a real gain over past years. The takeaway for Newark is that the two big air problems behave differently. Particle pollution is trending down over time, while ozone is a summer-afternoon problem that a heat wave can bring back quickly, which is worth watching when temperatures climb.
Newark air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Newark right now?
As of September 5, 2026 at 1:34 PM EDT, the air quality in Newark, New Jersey is AQI 18 — Good — with PM2.5 at 3.4 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Newark's Ironbound neighborhood have some of the worst air in the state?
The Ironbound sits inside a few square miles that hold the state's largest trash incinerator, gas power plants, warehouses, rail yards, the contaminated Passaic River, and thousands of diesel trucks a day serving the port and airport. That concentration of industry next to homes is why New Jersey's environmental justice law names the Ironbound as an overburdened community, and why emergency room visits for asthma across Newark run about triple the rest of the state.
Does wildfire smoke reach Newark?
It can, even though there are no wildfires nearby. In June 2023, smoke from wildfires in Quebec, Canada drifted down over the Northeast and pushed Newark's air to hazardous levels, the worst reading in New Jersey at the time. Events like that arrive with little warning and are exactly the kind of sudden change a live sensor and a push alert are built to catch.
What the AQI numbers mean
| AQI | Category | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| 0–50 | Good | Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity. |
| 51–100 | Moderate | Sensitive groups may want to take it slower outside. |
| 101–150 | Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups | Kids, elderly, and respiratory conditions stay closer to home. |
| 151–200 | Unhealthy | Skip outdoor exercise. Close windows. |
| 201–300 | Very Unhealthy | Limit time outside. N95 if you must go. |
| 301+ | Hazardous | Health emergency. Stay inside, run filtration if you have it. |
Canairy lets you tighten these bands if you’re more sensitive than the EPA default, so an alert can fire before the official category changes. How to read the Air Quality Index
Where these readings come from
The AQI at the top of this page is the median of the 5 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around Newark, with outliers set aside so that one sensor brought indoors — or parked beside a barbecue — cannot set the number for a whole city. Every sensor behind it is listed above with its distance and bearing from the city center. There is no black box here.
In the app, a place you save resolves the same way first. When no neighborhood sensor is reporting it falls back to the nearest EPA AirNow monitor, and anything modeled rather than measured is labelled a regional estimate rather than passed off as a sensor reading. How low-cost sensors compare to regulatory monitors
About Canairy
Canairy is free to download. The free plan covers one saved place with live readings, a plain-English verdict, and push alerts when the air crosses a threshold you choose. Paid plans add more places, faster refreshes, and SMS alerts. It is built by two parents in Sonoma County, California, who got tired of guessing whether it was safe to send the kids outside. Why we built it
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Air quality near Newark
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