Air Quality in Tacoma, Washington — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Tacoma — with free alerts the moment smoke moves in.
AQI 26 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Tacoma, Washington is AQI 26 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 4.7 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 21 to 75. 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 Tacoma: 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 Tacoma and Lakewood, Puyallup, Federal Way, Gig Harbor. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Tacoma
The sensors Canairy reads in Tacoma are 54 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 |
|---|---|---|
| 2.6 mi SE | 75 | Moderate |
| 2.7 mi SSE | 31 | Good |
| 3.4 mi SSW | 26 | Good |
| 5.7 mi NE | 21 | Good |
Tacoma has spent more than a century living with its air. The city grew up around the smokestacks of the Commencement Bay tideflats, earned the nickname 'Aroma of Tacoma' for the rotten-egg smell that industry left over the port, and still carries the soil legacy of the old ASARCO smelter. Today the sharpest swings come from two things: late-summer wildfire smoke that rides the wind in from the Cascades and beyond, and winter wood smoke that settles over neighborhoods on cold, still nights.
What Canairy does for Tacoma
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Tacoma: 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 Tacoma or across the country, on one screen.
What the air in Tacoma is doing next
| When | AQI | Expected air quality | Main pollutant |
|---|---|---|---|
| Today | 33 | Good | PM2.5 |
| Tomorrow | 33 | Good | PM2.5 |
| Monday | 33 | Good | PM2.5 |
| Tuesday | 33 | Good | PM2.5 |
| Wednesday | 33 | Good | PM2.5 |
For Fri-Mon (Sep 4-7) We'll have mostly GOOD to MODERATE air quality this weekend. Late this afternoon and early evening, we may have some smoke moving into the Cascades and sneaking through the passes. Some areas could reach MODERATE or UNHEALTHY FOR SENSITIVE GROUPS for a few hours. Overnight and into Saturday, winds should shift back to westerly and mix the smoke and push it back east. This pattern could repeat again Saturday evening and Sun. Monday should have good westerly winds and GOOD air quality.
Forecast from EPA AirNow for the Tacoma-Puyallup 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.
Wildfire smoke is now Tacoma's worst air of the year
The clearest, cleanest air in the region often turns to some of the dirtiest during wildfire season. In September 2020, easterly winds up to 50 miles an hour pushed smoke from fires over the Cascades, and then a wind shift on September 10 dragged a huge offshore plume back over western Washington. Tacoma's daily average AQI hit 182 on September 11, and from September 12 to 17 every air monitor in the state read above the federal standard. It was the longest stretch of hazardous air the region had ever recorded.
It was not a one-off. The 2022 Bolt Creek Fire burned along Highway 2 from September into late October and repeatedly sent smoke over Puget Sound, pushing parts of Pierce County into unhealthy-for-sensitive-groups territory. The pattern is common enough that the American Lung Association's 2026 State of the Air report ranked the Seattle-Tacoma metro eighth worst in the country for short-term particle pollution, driven almost entirely by wildfire smoke. The air here is usually good, which is exactly why a smoke event is so jarring when it arrives.
The tideflats, the 'Aroma,' and the smelter that left its mark
Tacoma's industrial air story is older than any wildfire. For roughly a century the tideflats around Commencement Bay were packed with pulp mills, a rendering plant, chemical works, and a petroleum refinery, and the mix of hydrogen sulfide and industrial fumes gave the city its rotten-egg 'Aroma of Tacoma' — concentrated over the port and most familiar to drivers on Interstate 5. As heavy industry has closed or cleaned up, that smell has largely faded, though the working port and its truck and rail traffic are still part of the local air picture.
The heaviest legacy came from the ASARCO copper smelter in Ruston, which ran from 1889 to 1986. Its 571-foot stack, once the tallest smokestack in the world, spread arsenic and lead that settled across more than 1,000 square miles of the Puget Sound Basin. The stack came down on January 17, 1993, and the cleaned-up waterfront is now Dune Peninsula park — but the Tacoma Smelter Plume remains one of the first Superfund sites in the nation and the largest contaminated site in Washington. The Health Department's Dirt Alert program still helps residents test and manage arsenic and lead left in the soil.
Winter wood smoke is the quiet, recurring problem
Away from fire season, Tacoma's hardest air days come in the dead of winter. When cold, stagnant high pressure settles in, there is no wind to clear the fine particles from home fireplaces and wood stoves, and pollution builds up fast near the ground overnight. This is a documented, recurring problem here, not a rare event.
It was serious enough that the EPA designated Tacoma-Pierce County a PM2.5 nonattainment area in November 2009 — one of only about 32 places in the country failing the federal standard at the time, mostly because of wood smoke. The area cleaned up and was redesignated to attainment in 2015, but the safeguards stayed: since October 2015 it has been illegal to run an uncertified wood stove in the Tacoma-Pierce County Smoke Reduction Zone, and the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency still calls Stage 1 and Stage 2 burn bans on stagnant winter days. If you heat with wood, a burn ban is the local signal that the air outside is already loading up.
Tacoma air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Tacoma right now?
As of September 5, 2026 at 5:10 AM PDT, the air quality in Tacoma, Washington is AQI 26 — Good — with PM2.5 at 4.7 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Tacoma get so smoky during wildfire season?
Tacoma's air is usually clean, but late-summer wind patterns can carry wildfire smoke in from the Cascades and beyond and trap it over Puget Sound. In September 2020 the city's daily average AQI reached 182 during hazardous conditions, and the 2022 Bolt Creek Fire pushed parts of Pierce County into unhealthy air. The Seattle-Tacoma metro now ranks among the ten worst US metros for short-term particle pollution, largely because of these smoke events.
Does Tacoma still have a winter wood smoke problem?
Winter is when Tacoma's local air pollution peaks. On cold, stagnant nights there's no wind to disperse the fine particles from wood stoves and fireplaces, so they build up near the ground. The area was a federal PM2.5 nonattainment zone from 2009 to 2015 mostly because of wood smoke, and the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency still calls winter burn bans in Pierce County when the air stagnates. A burn ban is a good sign to keep an eye on your local reading.
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 4 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around Tacoma, 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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