Air Quality in Toledo, Ohio — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Toledo — with free alerts the moment smoke drifts in.
AQI 36 from 3 PurpleAir sensors · Trending up · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Toledo, Ohio is AQI 36 — Good and rising — with PM2.5 at 6.6 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors reading 29 to 37. 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 Toledo: weeds 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 Toledo and Sylvania, Maumee, Oregon, Perrysburg. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Toledo
The sensors Canairy reads in Toledo agree right now — all 3 sit in the Good band, a 8-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| City center | 36 | Good |
| 3.3 mi SSW | 29 | Good |
| 3.9 mi W | 37 | Good |
Toledo's air story is not really a wildfire story. It is shaped by where the city sits, at the western end of Lake Erie where the Maumee River empties into the lake, and by more than a century of heavy industry: the glass plants that gave Toledo its nickname, the steel and auto works, and the refineries just east of downtown in Oregon. Summer ozone, stagnant lake-edge air, and the occasional smoke plume like the one that reached the Great Lakes in June 2023 do the rest.
What Canairy does for Toledo
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Toledo: 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 Toledo or across the country, on one screen.
Toledo's air is shaped more by industry than by wildfires
Toledo earned the name 'The Glass City' from a manufacturing base that still runs deep: Owens-Illinois, Owens Corning, Libbey, and Pilkington all trace their roots here, and Cleveland-Cliffs opened a new hot-briquetted iron plant in the area in 2020 to modernize its steel operations. Jeep and the auto industry remain major employers. That industrial density is the backdrop to a lot of the region's day-to-day air.
The most visible source sits just east of the city. The 155,000-barrel-per-day Toledo refinery in Oregon, Ohio, has been running since it began as a BP-Husky joint venture, and Cenovus Energy took over BP's half of it in 2023. Along with the neighboring Sun refinery, these plants have long been among the area's largest employers, and they are the kind of continuous, close-to-home emission source that a sensor near Oregon or East Toledo will pick up long before a distant wildfire does.
Sitting on Lake Erie's western basin brings summer ozone and stagnant air
Toledo straddles the mouth of the Maumee River at the southern end of Maumee Bay, on the shallow western basin of Lake Erie. On hot, still summer days the combination of strong sunshine, lake breezes that trap and recirculate air, and emissions from traffic and industry can cook up ground-level ozone, the pollutant that turns hazy afternoons into 'code orange' days.
Lucas County has a real history with this. It was once a designated ozone nonattainment area under the federal standards and has since been redesignated to maintenance, meaning it now meets the mark but is watched to make sure it stays there. Ohio's most stubborn ozone problem today is greater Cleveland to the east, but Toledo's location and industry mean summer ozone is still the pollutant most likely to push local readings up.
Wildfire smoke is rare here, but 2023 proved the Great Lakes aren't immune
For most of the year Toledo's fine-particle pollution comes from local sources, not fire. But in June 2023 smoke from Canadian wildfires poured south into the Midwest and Great Lakes. Chicago recorded 228 on the Air Quality Index on June 27, the worst reading of any major city in the world that day, Minneapolis had already hit 256 earlier in the month, and neighboring Michigan issued air quality alerts as roughly 80 million Americans came under advisories.
Northwest Ohio sits squarely inside that footprint, downwind of the same plume that pushed Detroit and the rest of the lower Great Lakes into unhealthy territory. Days like that are the exception rather than the rule here, but they are exactly the kind of fast, region-wide shift that is easy to miss until the sky turns gray, which is when a live sensor reading closest to your own street earns its keep.
Toledo air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Toledo right now?
As of September 5, 2026 at 8:10 AM EDT, the air quality in Toledo, Ohio is AQI 36 — Good — with PM2.5 at 6.6 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Do the refineries near Toledo affect the air quality?
They are the biggest continuous local source. The 155,000-barrel-per-day refinery in Oregon, just east of downtown, and its neighboring plant have run for decades as some of the area's largest employers, and heavy industry like this is what tends to shape Toledo's air on an ordinary day more than any distant wildfire. Canairy's sensors near Oregon and East Toledo let you watch that part of the map directly instead of guessing.
Does Toledo get wildfire smoke?
Not often, but it can. Toledo is not a wildfire-prone city, and most of its fine-particle pollution comes from local traffic and industry. The exception was June 2023, when smoke from Canadian wildfires spread across the Great Lakes and pushed nearby cities like Chicago and Detroit into unhealthy ranges. Northwest Ohio sat inside that footprint, which is why a live reading near you matters most on the rare days the whole region shifts at once.
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 3 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around Toledo, 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 Toledo
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