Discover the best time of year, based on historical climate, temperature, and precipitation.
The best time to visit Big Apple is May, June, September, when the weather, flight prices, and crowds align. — variable climate
🌦Cool & rainy
Contains affiliate links.
Contains affiliate links.
| Score | 12 | 13 | 17 | 49 | 78 | 79 | 67 | 75 | 76 | 71 | 39 | 11 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Climate | Cold | Cold | Cold | Cold | Mild | Humid | Humid | Humid | Humid | Cool & rainy | Cold | Cold |
| Temperature | -3–4°C | -3–6°C | 0–10°C | 6–15°C | 12–21°C | 17–26°C | 21–29°C | 20–28°C | 16–25°C | 11–19°C | 4–12°C | 0–7°C |
| Feels like | -8–0°C | -8–2°C | -4–6°C | 2–13°C | 10–21°C | 17–27°C | 23–32°C | 22–30°C | 16–25°C | 9–17°C | 0–9°C | -4–3°C |
| Precipitation | 100mm 10 days | 91mm 9 days | 116mm 10 days | 108mm 10 days | 94mm 11 days | 99mm 12 days | 139mm 13 days | 115mm 12 days | 120mm 9 days | 125mm 10 days | 76mm 8 days | 115mm 10 days |
| Sunshine | 6.1h ☀︎ 63% | 6.9h ☀︎ 64% | 8.2h ☀︎ 69% | 8.5h ☀︎ 64% | 9.3h ☀︎ 64% | 11.1h ☀︎ 74% | 11.6h ☀︎ 79% | 10.9h ☀︎ 79% | 9.1h ☀︎ 73% | 7.8h ☀︎ 70% | 7.1h ☀︎ 72% | 5.4h ☀︎ 58% |
| Wind | W · 22 km/h | W · 22 km/h | NW · 24 km/h | W · 23 km/h | S · 20 km/h | SW · 20 km/h | SW · 19 km/h | SW · 18 km/h | N · 18 km/h | W · 20 km/h | W · 21 km/h | W · 20 km/h |
| Humidity (%) | 68% | 69% | 66% | 67% | 71% | 71% | 73% | 74% | 75% | 74% | 70% | 73% |
| Perfect days | 0% | 0% | 3% | 13% | 32% | 39% | 18% | 29% | 51% | 24% | 4% | 0% |
| Dry streak | 7d | 7d | 8d | 7d | 8d | 6d | 6d | 7d | 10d | 9d | 8d | 8d |
| Sunny streak | 7d | 7d | 8d | 11d | 11d | 16d | 18d | 16d | 12d | 10d | 8d | 7d |
| Extreme heat | — | — | — | — | — | 1% | 3% | 1% | 1% | — | — | — |
| Extreme cold | 74% | 77% | 50% | 6% | — | — | — | — | — | — | 16% | 54% |
| Temperature | +1.3° | +2.5° | +2.9° | +0.1° | +1.1° | +1.2° | +1.8° | +0.6° | +0.6° | +1.9° | +1.4° | +1.8° |
| Rainfall | Stable | Stable | Getting wetter | Stable | Stable | Getting drier | Getting wetter | Getting wetter | Getting wetter | Stable | Stable | Stable |
| Ideal warm days | 0% | 0% | 0% | 2% | 11% | 26% | 38% | 41% | 22% | 3% | 0% | 0% |
| Outdoor comfort | 0% | 0% | 2% | 14% | 33% | 32% | 10% | 20% | 47% | 26% | 6% | 0% |
| Dry week odds | 9% | 7% | 8% | 10% | 11% | 3% | 2% | 7% | 19% | 12% | 11% | 9% |
| Heavy rain | 5% | 4% | 5% | 4% | 3% | 4% | 5% | 5% | 4% | 7% | 4% | 5% |
| Snow days | 22% | 25% | 16% | 2% | — | — | — | — | — | — | 4% | 15% |
| Muggy days | — | — | — | — | — | 10% | 37% | 27% | 10% | 1% | — | — |
| Oppressive days | — | — | — | — | — | — | 1% | — | — | — | — | — |
| Day length | 9.6h | 10.7h | 12.0h | 13.3h | 14.5h | 15.0h | 14.7h | 13.7h | 12.4h | 11.1h | 9.9h | 9.3h |
| Tourist Crowds | Low season | Low season | High season | High season | High season | High season | High season | High season | High season | High season | High season | High season |
Experience the iconic ball drop in Times Square, a global spectacle marking the new year. Expect extremely cold weather…
Witness the spectacular Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, featuring giant balloons, floats, and performers. Held in late N…
Join millions of spectators cheering on runners in the world's largest marathon, held on the first Sunday of November. T…
Immerse yourself in independent cinema at the Tribeca Film Festival, usually held in April. The spring weather is typica…
Join the creative chaos of the Village Halloween Parade, a unique spectacle of costumes and puppets on October 31st. The…
Experience one of the world's oldest and largest St. Patrick's Day parades, marching up Fifth Avenue on March 17th. Whil…
Enjoy free concerts and performances across New York City parks, primarily in Central Park, from June to August. The war…
Attend New York City's premier multi-genre music festival, typically held in early June. The weather is usually pleasant…
Take advantage of 2-for-1 tickets to Broadway shows during this biannual promotion, often held in January/February and S…
Celebrate spring at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's Sakura Matsuri, typically held in late April or early May. The pleasan…
New York's tourism calendar is upside down: visitors overwhelm the city at its rawest and coldest in November and December, leaving the glorious, sun-drenched weeks of late spring and early autumn surprisingly unburdened.
New York City has an almost theatrical disregard for comfort. It is an immense engine of ambition and architecture, where five boroughs compress eight and a half million lives onto the edge of one of the world's great natural harbors. The common myth is that autumn belongs to strollers in wool coats and winter belongs to holiday magic, but the reality is starker. The city reaches its absolute peak crowd density in November, when biting winds begin to whip off the water and apparent temperatures plunge, while late spring—when the sidewalk café awnings unroll and the city softens into pure joy—slips past with noticeably breathing room.
Late spring into early June is New York at its absolute peak. The relentless grey chill breaks, daytime temperatures settle into that rare, immaculate balance where a light jacket suffices after dark, and the daylight lingers for eleven glorious hours. Across Manhattan and Brooklyn, brownstone stoops fill with neighbors, and the avenues feel less like wind tunnels and more like communal living rooms.
Everything turns outward. The Governors Ball Music Festival kicks off summer with thumping bass, while the citywide SummerStage series begins filling park lawns with free performances. In Brooklyn, the cherry blossoms at the Botanic Garden scatter their pink petals, drawing crowds outdoors to celebrate the simple relief of warm air. Even crossing the Hudson on a ferry toward Hoboken or Jersey City feels like an event rather than a commute, with the skyline glittering beneath high, bright skies and steady breezes off the bay.
High summer in the city is an intense, full-body experience. Midday heat radiates upward from asphalt and concrete, trapping thick humidity between skyscraper canyons. Down in the subway stations, waiting on the platform feels like standing inside a running convection oven, and sudden, torrential downpours can flood intersections in minutes before the sun steams the puddles dry.
Yet summer possesses its own romance if you adapt your schedule. The city slows slightly during the middle of the day, only to roar back to life at dusk. Breezes trace the harbor edges, making the waterfronts of Queens and the piers of Manhattan the places to be. Rooftop bars and park lawns stay packed well past midnight, and open-air concerts keep the nights buzzing, even when the air retains the heavy warmth of a southern swamp.
September and October deliver what the holiday brochures falsely promise: New York at its crispest, cleanest, and most stylish. The heavy humidity drains away, replaced by sharp, clear air and luminous golden light that reflects off steel and brick. Crucially, tourist volumes dip below their summer peaks, making October the quietest month of the entire year to navigate the city.
You can walk thirty blocks without wilting or freezing. Dining tables remain out on the avenues, the parks turn amber and rust, and cultural life snaps into sharp focus. The Tribeca neighborhood hums, and October culminates in the wild, theatrical energy of the Village Halloween Parade, where creative chaos sweeps through the streets under clear autumn skies. If you want the city at its most effortlessly cosmopolitan, this is the window.
November marks the paradox of New York: it is the single most crowded month on the calendar, yet the climate score takes a brutal tumble. Raw winds barrel down the grid, daylight hours contract sharply, and apparent temperatures hover in the single digits. Despite this, millions descend for the marathon cheering lines and the colossal balloons of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, filling midtown sidewalks to an absolute standstill.
December doubles down on the sensory overload. The city is frigid, damp, and relentlessly busy with shoppers, holiday displays, and the frozen pilgrimage to Times Square for New Year's Eve. There is undeniable theatricality in the glowing shop windows and bundled crowds, but you must be prepared for glacial winds funneled between towers, crowded indoor spaces, and the sharp bite of winter along the open avenues.
After the ball drops, the city empties out and settles into a stark, iron-grey endurance test. January and February are bitter, with icy sleet, blackened snowbanks, and a biting chill that cuts through wool coats. The upside is rare elbow room: NYC Broadway Week offers half-price tickets to world-class theater, and world-class museums can be explored without standing in snaking lines.
March brings the raucous green sea of the St. Patrick's Day Parade, but do not mistake it for spring—the winds remain fiercely cold and rain frequently sweeps across the harbor. It is not until late April, as the Tribeca Film Festival rolls into view and green shoots finally appear, that the city shakes off its winter slumber and prepares for its great outdoor renaissance.
Top sights and attractions to build your days around once you know when to go.
The Statue of Liberty is a colossal neoclassical sculpture of a robed and crowned woman on Liberty Island, part of New York City, in New York Harbor. The copper-clad statue, a gift to the United States from the people of France, was designed by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, and its metal framework built by Gustave Eiffel. The statue was dedicated on October 28, 1886.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an encyclopedic art museum in New York City. By floor area, it is the fourth-largest museum in the world and the largest art museum in the Americas. With 5,727,258 visitors in fiscal year 2025, it was the most-visited museum in the United States and the fifth-most visited art museum in the world.
Central Park is an urban park between the Upper West Side and Upper East Side neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City, and the first landscaped park in the United States. It is the sixth-largest park in the city, containing 843 acres (341 ha), and the most visited urban park in the United States, with an estimated 42 million visitors annually as of 2016. Central Park is owned by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation but has been managed by the Central Park Conservancy since 1998 under a contract with the government of New York City in a public–private partnership. The conservancy, a non-profit organization, sets Central Park's annual operating budget and is responsible for care of the park.
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, and includes over 200,000 works of architecture and design, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, prints, illustrated and artist's books, film, as well as electronic media. The museum has been instrumental in shaping the history of modern art, particularly modern art from Europe.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, often referred to as The Guggenheim, is an art museum at 1071 Fifth Avenue between 88th and 89th Streets on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It hosts a permanent collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions throughout the year. It was established by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1939 as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, under the guidance of its first director, Hilla von Rebay. The museum adopted its current name in 1952, three years after the death of its founder Solomon R. Guggenheim. It continues to be operated and owned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) is a natural history museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. Located in Theodore Roosevelt Park, across the street from Central Park, the museum complex comprises 21 interconnected buildings housing 45 permanent exhibition halls, in addition to a planetarium and a library. The museum collections contain about 32 million specimens of plants, animals, fungi, fossils, minerals, rocks, meteorites, human remains, and human cultural artifacts, as well as specialized collections for frozen tissue and genomic and astrophysical data, of which only a small fraction can be displayed at any given time. The museum occupies more than 2,500,000 ft2 (232,258 m2). AMNH has a full-time scientific staff of 225, sponsors over 120 special field expeditions each year, and averages about five million visits annually.
The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At 560,000 square feet (52,000 m2), the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 500,000 objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown Heights, Flatbush, and Park Slope neighborhoods of Brooklyn, the museum's Beaux-Arts building was designed by McKim, Mead & White.
St. Patrick's Cathedral is a Catholic cathedral in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City, United States. It is the seat of the Archbishop of New York as well as a parish church. The cathedral occupies a city block bounded by Fifth Avenue, Madison Avenue, 50th Street, and 51st Street, directly across from Rockefeller Center. Designed by James Renwick Jr., it is the largest Gothic Revival Catholic cathedral in North America.
The National September 11 Memorial & Museum is a memorial and museum that are part of the World Trade Center complex, in New York City, created for remembering the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks which killed 2,977 people, as well as the February 26, 1993, World Trade Center bombing which killed six. The memorial is located at the World Trade Center site, the former location of the Twin Towers that were destroyed during the September 11 attacks. It is operated by a non-profit institution whose mission is to raise funds to program and operate the memorial and museum at the World Trade Center site.
The Battery, formerly known as Battery Park, is a 25-acre (10 ha) public park located at the southern tip of Manhattan Island in New York City facing New York Harbor. The park is bounded by Battery Place on the north, with Bowling Green to the northeast, State Street on the east, New York Harbor to the south, and the Hudson River to the west. The park contains attractions such as an early 19th-century fort named Castle Clinton; multiple monuments; and the SeaGlass Carousel. The surrounding area, known as South Ferry, contains multiple ferry terminals, including the Staten Island Ferry's Whitehall Terminal; a boat launch to the Statue of Liberty National Monument ; and a boat launch to Governors Island.
Madison Square is a public square formed by the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Broadway at 23rd Street in the New York City borough of Manhattan. The square was named for Founding Father James Madison, the fourth president of the United States. The focus of the square is Madison Square Park, a 6.2-acre (2.5-hectare) public park, which is bounded on the east by Madison Avenue ; on the south by 23rd Street; on the north by 26th Street; and on the west by Fifth Avenue and Broadway as they cross.
Prospect Park is a 526-acre (2.13 km2) urban park in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. The park is situated between the neighborhoods of Park Slope, Prospect Heights, Crown Heights, Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Flatbush, and Windsor Terrace, and is adjacent to the Brooklyn Museum, Grand Army Plaza, and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Prospect Park is the second-largest public park in Brooklyn, behind Marine Park. Designated as a New York City scenic landmark and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, Prospect Park is operated by the Prospect Park Alliance and NYC Parks.
Places from Wikidata and Wikipedia.
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State of New Jersey · United States of America
State of New Jersey · United States of America
State of New Jersey · United States of America