Air Quality in Rutland, Vermont — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Rutland — with free alerts when winter wood smoke settles into the valley.
AQI 34 from 2 PurpleAir sensors · Trending up · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Rutland, Vermont is AQI 34 — Good and rising — with PM2.5 at 6.1 µg/m³, the median of 2 live PurpleAir sensors reading 33 to 34. 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 Rutland: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a low 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 Rutland and Pittsford, Proctor, Killington, Brandon. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Rutland
The sensors Canairy reads in Rutland agree right now — all 2 sit in the Good band, a 1-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 0.6 mi SE | 33 | Good |
| 0.6 mi SE | 34 | Good |
Rutland's air is quietly good most of the year — this is a city of about 15,800 people tucked in the Otter Creek valley of southwestern Vermont, without the heavy industry or highway traffic that gives many small cities a pollution problem. The exception is winter. Rutland sits in a valley pinched between the Green Mountains to the east and the Taconic Range to the west, in a part of Vermont where wood stoves and fireplaces are still a common way to heat a home. On cold, still nights the valley traps that smoke close to the ground instead of letting it clear, and the city's own real-time monitor has recorded AQI readings that swing from clean to genuinely elevated within the same week.
What Canairy does for Rutland
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Rutland: 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 Rutland or across the country, on one screen.
Why Rutland's valley setting matters
Rutland sits at about 541 feet in the Otter Creek valley, the historic north-south lowland that runs between the Green Mountains — home to Killington and Pico, a few miles east — and the Taconic Range toward the New York line. Otter Creek itself rises in those mountains and flows north through the city on its way to Lake Champlain, and the same low, flat corridor that carried the river also became the natural route for Route 4 and Route 7, the two highways that funnel traffic through town.
That geography is a mixed blessing for the air. In summer, afternoon breezes moving up the valley tend to clear things out, which is part of why Rutland's air quality is unremarkable — in a good way — for most of the year. In winter, the same ridgelines that shelter the valley from wind also let cold, dense air settle in in and sit there overnight, a textbook temperature inversion that holds smoke and exhaust close to the ground until the sun breaks it up the next day.
Wood heat is a real, everyday source here
Vermont has one of the highest rates of wood heating in the country, and Rutland County — a place of small farms, older housing stock, and cold winters that regularly drop well below zero — leans on wood stoves and fireplaces more than most of New England. On a still January or February night, dozens of chimneys across the city and in surrounding towns like Pittsford and Mendon are putting fine particles into air that has nowhere to go, and Rutland's local monitoring data shows wintertime PM2.5 climbing on exactly those calm, cold evenings.
It's a different pattern than the wildfire smoke that dominates air-quality conversations out west: no dramatic orange sky, just a gradual buildup of particle pollution that's easy to miss without a sensor, especially since the smell of a wood fire reads as cozy rather than as a warning sign.
The one time Canadian wildfire smoke reached Rutland
Vermont doesn't have a wildfire season of its own, but it isn't insulated from everyone else's. In the summer of 2023, smoke from record Canadian wildfires in Quebec drifted south over the entire state; Burlington's air was rated 'very unhealthy' by the EPA scale overnight on June 25 into June 26, and a University of Vermont study later found the smoke measurably worsened asthma control in children across Vermont and upstate New York that summer. Rutland felt it too — the city's own air-quality record shows its highest reading of the past several years came on July 1, 2023, when AQI hit 146, squarely in the Unhealthy range, as the same smoke plume lingered over the region.
It was an unusual event rather than an annual one, but it's a reminder that a clean-looking Rutland sky doesn't guarantee clean air — the particles that matter most are often the ones you can't see coming from hundreds of miles away.
Rutland air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Rutland right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 8:27 PM EDT, the air quality in Rutland, Vermont is AQI 34 — Good — with PM2.5 at 6.1 µg/m³, the median of 2 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Rutland's air get worse in winter?
Rutland sits in the Otter Creek valley between the Green Mountains and the Taconic Range, and on cold, still nights that valley traps air instead of letting it clear - a temperature inversion. Combined with Rutland County's heavy reliance on wood stoves and fireplaces for heat, that means fine particle pollution can build up on winter evenings even when the sky looks clear.
Did wildfire smoke ever reach Rutland?
Yes, in the summer of 2023. Smoke from record wildfires in Quebec drifted over all of Vermont, pushing Burlington to 'very unhealthy' air quality overnight in late June, and Rutland's own monitoring record shows its air hit an AQI of 146 - Unhealthy - on July 1, 2023, during the same event. It isn't a yearly occurrence, but it showed Rutland isn't insulated from smoke sourced hundreds of miles away.
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 2 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around Rutland, 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
Go deeper
Air quality near Rutland
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