Air Quality in Raleigh, North Carolina — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Raleigh — with free alerts when ozone or smoke pushes the air into unhealthy territory.
AQI 43 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Holding steady · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Raleigh, North Carolina is AQI 43 — Good and holding steady — with PM2.5 at 7.7 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 38 to 52. 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 Raleigh: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a high 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 Raleigh and Cary, Garner, Wake Forest, Knightdale. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Raleigh
The sensors Canairy reads in Raleigh are 14 AQI points apart right now, from Good to Moderate, which is the whole reason one city-wide number can mislead you: the median describes air you may not be standing in.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 2.4 mi NNW | 38 | Good |
| 3.0 mi N | 52 | Moderate |
| 3.9 mi WSW | 40 | Good |
| 4.3 mi SSW | 43 | Good |
| 5.0 mi NNE | 48 | Good |
Raleigh's air is good most of the year, and it's gotten better: the Triangle logged zero ozone exceedances in 2025, only the second time that's happened since 2000. But this is a Piedmont city built on summer heat, humidity, and highway traffic, and on the hottest, stillest July and August afternoons, ground-level ozone can still climb into Code Orange territory. Late winter brings a different kind of haze — North Carolina burns more prescribed acreage than any other state in the Southeast, and smoke from controlled burns each February and March can drift over the Triangle for a few hours at a stretch.
What Canairy does for Raleigh
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Raleigh: 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 Raleigh or across the country, on one screen.
What the air in Raleigh is doing next
| When | AQI | Expected air quality | Main pollutant |
|---|---|---|---|
| Today | 40 | Good | ozone |
| Tomorrow | 45 | Good | ozone |
| Thursday | 50 | Good | ozone |
Forecast from EPA AirNow for the Wake County 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.
Raleigh's real air story is summer ozone, not wildfire smoke
The Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area was formally designated an ozone nonattainment area by the EPA in 1990, after violating the federal standard from 1987 through 1989. It took until December 2007 for the region to earn redesignation back to attainment, on the strength of cleaner vehicles and a roughly 54 percent statewide cut in NOx emissions. That history is why Wake County still runs a summer ozone forecast: heat, sunlight, and tailpipe exhaust are the raw ingredients, and the Piedmont's flat, fall-line terrain does nothing to help disperse them on a windless afternoon.
2025 was about as quiet as ozone season gets — Raleigh posted its highest average July dew point since 1946, and that extra humidity, cloud cover, and afternoon thunderstorms suppressed the ozone chemistry that a hot, dry summer would otherwise favor. That's the exception, not a permanent shift: NC State's own air quality researchers note the state has strung together roughly a decade of attainment through emissions cuts, but a hot, stagnant, high-pressure stretch in July or August can still push the Triangle to a Code Orange action day, when sensitive groups are told to cut back on outdoor exertion.
Late winter and early spring bring prescribed-burn smoke
North Carolina has more wildland-urban interface acreage than any other state, and it leads the Southeast in the prescribed burning used to keep that land from becoming wildfire fuel. Burn season peaks in February and March — dormant-season months the state has designated Prescribed Fire Awareness time — and a single burn typically causes a brief, localized PM2.5 spike lasting only a few hours while the fire is active.
The harder days are when many burns happen at once across the Southeast and a temperature inversion holds the combined smoke close to the ground — conditions NC State's air quality forecasters flag as the trickiest to call, since smoke can arrive from burns well outside Wake County. On March 14, 2024, satellite imagery showed plumes stretching across the whole region, a reminder that a clear morning in Raleigh doesn't guarantee a clear afternoon once burning ramps up elsewhere in the state.
Why Raleigh doesn't get the same smoke seasons as the West
Raleigh sits at the fall line, the low, gently rolling boundary where the Piedmont meets the coastal plain, at an elevation of only about 101 meters (331 feet). There's no mountain valley or basin to trap air the way Western wildfire towns experience it — the terrain here is flat enough that pollution tends to disperse rather than pool, which is a real structural advantage.
That doesn't make Raleigh immune to smoke from far away. In the summer of 2023, smoke from Canada's historic wildfire season pushed into the eastern United States repeatedly, and North Carolina was part of that pattern on several of those days. It's the same reason Canairy tracks live sensor readings instead of assuming a distant, generally clean region can't have a bad afternoon: the source doesn't have to be local for the air to be worth checking.
Raleigh air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Raleigh right now?
As of September 15, 2026 at 8:10 AM EDT, the air quality in Raleigh, North Carolina is AQI 43 — Good — with PM2.5 at 7.7 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Raleigh get ozone alerts in the summer?
Ground-level ozone forms when heat, strong sunlight, and pollutants from vehicles and other sources react in the air, and Raleigh's hot, humid Piedmont summers are exactly that recipe. The Triangle was under a federal ozone nonattainment designation from 1990 to 2007, and even after a decade of cleaner air, a hot and stagnant stretch in July or August can still push the AQI into Code Orange, when sensitive groups are told to ease up on outdoor exertion.
Why does Raleigh smell smoky in late winter?
From roughly February through March, land managers across North Carolina and the Southeast run prescribed burns to clear undergrowth before wildfire season, and North Carolina leads the region in burned acreage. A single burn usually clears in a few hours, but when many burns overlap or a temperature inversion holds the smoke down, PM2.5 can spike well beyond the immediate area.
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 Raleigh, 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 Raleigh
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