Best Time to Visit Checker
Twelve months of a destination side by side — temperature, rain, daylight and how busy it gets — ranked against what you actually care about.
Nothing you type here is uploaded, stored or sent anywhere. It all runs in your browser.
Shoulder season is a real thing and it is usually two specific months
Every destination has a month where the weather is best and a month where it is cheapest, and they are almost never the same month. The useful answer sits between them: late enough that the weather has turned, early enough that the prices and the queues have not. For most of the Mediterranean that is May and late September. For South East Asia it is the month either side of the monsoon. For the Caucasus it is May and October, and the difference between June and September in Armenia is thirty degrees of afternoon heat for the same landscape.
The table does not decide for you, because the trade-off is yours. What it does is put the four things you are actually trading against each other on the same row, which is harder to do from four browser tabs than it sounds.
Where these numbers come from, and what they hide
The temperature and rainfall figures are monthly climatological normals — the average of thirty years of observations at a station in or near each place, mostly for the 1991–2020 period, rounded. They were compiled by hand in September 2026. They tell you the shape of a normal year, which is exactly what you want when you are choosing between May and September, and exactly what you should not use when you are packing.
An average hides everything interesting about weather. A month averaging 24 °C contains 15 °C days and 33 °C days. A month averaging 20 mm of rain can contain a single storm that closes a road. Monsoon rainfall figures are particularly misleading as a monthly total, because 300 mm falling as a downpour every afternoon at four is a very different holiday from 300 mm of drizzle. Use the table to pick a month, then read a forecast in the fortnight before you go.
The crowd and price curves are a judgement
They are not measured. There is no public dataset of how busy a city feels, so the crowd curve is set by hand on a one-to-nine scale from school holiday calendars, festival dates and when flights get expensive. The price curve is derived from it and smoothed across the neighbouring months, because hotel rates go up before the crowds arrive and come down after they leave. Both are there to show you the shape of the year, and both are worth arguing with.
Why an empty, cheap, 41 °C month does not win
A plain weighted average would hand you Dubai in July, because July in Dubai is dry, empty and cheap, and three factors out of four beat one. So the whole month's score is discounted once the average daytime high climbs past about 35 °C or drops below about 5 °C — not just the warmth component. Past those points the temperature stops being one factor among four and starts being the only one, and a tool that pretends otherwise is giving advice nobody would follow.
Daylight is the factor people forget
Two months can share a temperature and differ by five hours of usable light. Rome in November is not much colder than Rome in March, but the sun sets before five and half the day is gone. The daylight column is computed from each place's latitude with the same solar equations as our sunrise calculator, for the 15th of each month, so it is a real figure and not an impression.
Questions people ask
What period are the averages taken from?
Mostly the 1991–2020 standard climatological normal, which is the current WMO reference period, with older station summaries where a 1991–2020 normal was not published for that station. They were compiled by hand in September 2026 and rounded — whole degrees, and rainfall to the nearest five millimetres.
Why is a hot month scored lower than a mild one when I said I want warm?
Because "warm" almost never means "as hot as possible". The warm score peaks around 24 °C in the daytime and falls away on both sides, so a 39 °C month in Dubai in July does not win. If you genuinely want the hottest month, read the average high column directly — it is right there.
How accurate are the crowd levels?
They are a judgement, not a measurement, and the page says so. There is no public dataset of how busy a place feels. The curve is set by hand from school holidays, festivals and flight pricing, on a one-to-nine scale, and it is meant to show the shape of the year rather than a precise level.
My destination is not in the list. What now?
Pick the nearest place on the list that shares a coastline or a mountain range with yours. Climate varies over tens of kilometres in mountains and over hundreds on a plain, so a neighbouring city on the same coast is usually within a degree or two, and a city on the other side of a range is not.
Does it account for hurricanes, monsoons or wildfire season?
Only through the rainfall figures, which is not enough. Tropical storm seasons, wildfire risk and monsoon onset dates are real constraints that a monthly average cannot express. Check those separately for anywhere they apply before you book.
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