Manchester weather by month
The best time to visit Manchester is June to August — 89/100 in July, 21°C and 16 rainy days. The best season is summer, June to August (87/100 on average).
The worst month is January at 49/100 — cold, rainy, clean air. See January →
Updated September 2026 · climate normals from ERA5 reanalysis
Planning the wider trip? Best time to visit United Kingdom →
Best season: June to August (87/100 on average) · worst January (49/100)
- Days
- 21°C
- Nights
- 13°C
- Wet days
- 16
- Sun
- 9.9 h
- Humidity
- 80%
- Daylight
- 16 h

Manchester, month by month
Comfort score out of 100 for the kind of trip Manchester is best for, the average high, rainy days and hours of sun a day from the climate normals, and how busy it tends to be.
What's on in Manchester through the year
Festivals, natural spectacles, holidays and the seasons to watch out for — curated and sourced. The month pages carry the detail.
- January
- Chinese New Year14–15 FebFestival
- April
- Manchester Marathon5–25 Apr (usually)Festival
- May
- Great Manchester Run10–31 May (usually)Festival
- Whit Friday band contests15 May – 20 Jun (usually)Festival
- June
- Parklife20–21 JunFestival
- Manchester International Festival25 Jun – 20 Jul (usually)Festival
- August
- Manchester Pride20 Aug – 1 Sep (usually)Festival
- Football season15 Aug – 25 MaySeason
- September
- Food and Drink Festival20 Sep – 10 Oct (usually)Festival
- Warehouse Project season15 Sep – 5 Jan (usually)Opening
- November
- Christmas markets7 Nov – 22 Dec (usually)Festival
Crowds in Manchester in July
How busy the place itself is — school and mass holidays, the months an editor tagged, and how sought-after the weather makes them. Never part of the comfort score.
BusySummer holidays in United Kingdom, school holidays in 6 of the markets that fill it(estimated)
Peak crowdsBusyShoulder seasonQuiet
Good to know before you go to Manchester
Real experiences from travellers' own write-ups, quoted with a link to the original.
Visas & entry
A first-time visitor's guide to Manchester notes the bus within the city center itself is free, a genuine money-saver for short hops between neighborhoods like the Northern Quarter, while the airport train into the city center takes about 20 minutes with departures every 10 minutes. Their advice for anyone visiting during football season: check the match schedule ahead of time, since tickets for a game sell out fast and catching one is one of the more distinctly Mancunian things to do, alongside bringing an umbrella regardless of forecast given the city's notoriously drizzly weather.
Traveller notes on Manchester
What people who have been say about the place — the year-round notes first, then month by month.
Manchester has a temperate maritime climate and rarely gets too warm or too cold. The city receives below-average rainfall for the UK. It is not significantly far behind London in terms of the average number of hours of sunlight per day (based on the last 100 years' data from Met Office) though it does have a few more days with rain. However, as a result of relatively mild winter conditions, there is never a period that one should avoid visiting due to extreme weather conditions. As with any city, it puts on a good show when the weather is fine in spring and summer and there is a lot of al fresco drinking and eating. It does have its fair share of dull, grey days, which can strangely add to its charm for the visitor. The summer months see daytime highs average around 20°C and overnight lows averaging around 13°C. On its hottest days the temperatures can reach or surpass 26°C and not go below 16°C at night, but these only happen from time to time and are uncommon.…
Manchester forum threads treat rain as the city's normal operating condition rather than a surprise - the recurring rainy-day threads where locals trade indoor itineraries are a fixture, and they read as the practical manual for a January visit: the Science and Industry Museum, the Manchester Museum's natural history galleries, the Imperial War Museum North, the indoor snow centre beside the Trafford Centre, plus National Trust houses such as Dunham Massey and Quarry Bank Mill for the brighter windows. Our record puts January in the dampest stretch of the year - about 15 rainy days and barely 3 hours of average daily sunshine, with an occasional few centimetres of snow that rarely settles for long. The forum's picture of winter Manchester is a city well suited to it: compact enough to cross on foot in about 25 minutes, dense with museums and arcades, and easy to enjoy in wet weather if you plan indoors-first and treat a bright, clear spell as the bonus rather than the plan.
Manchester forum threads describe July as typically warm and often sunny ahead of school holidays, though genuinely wet stretches happen too - posters put average temperatures somewhere in the high-teens to low-20s Celsius with roughly ten days of some rain during the month. Manchester's humid, cloudy oceanic climate was repeatedly flagged as wetter than drier parts of England given its western location, though it stays mild rather than extreme in either direction. The standard packing advice across threads: a light waterproof jacket plus thin, layerable clothing you can add or remove, since forecasts here are only reliably accurate a few days out.
The standing Manchester-forum answer to what the weather is like: it is a myth that it always rains here, and changeable is the better adjective - grey and wet on some days, with cloud that often makes it feel milder than other parts of Europe. Northern England is genuinely variable, so come prepared rather than optimistic. The August packing list posters give is layers, an umbrella or a light waterproof jacket, and t-shirts, a jumper, long sleeves, shorts and trousers all in the same bag, even if you have heard a heatwave is due. The record: 20.4C days, 12.7C nights, 15.6 precipitation days and 84.4mm, humidity near 81 percent, 9.2 hours of sun inside 14.7 hours of daylight, AQI 32.
Regulars put late September here at 10 to 17C with cooler evenings and rain expected, and our row lands on exactly that: 18.1C by day feeling 17C, 10.4C at night feeling 9C in a 20.4 kph wind. Their instruction is layers rather than one coat - a thin jumper, a thicker one, and a light top layer that keeps water out. On how much rain, the honest arithmetic is worth having: 96.4mm across 14.4 days is under seven millimetres a day, so the city's reputation is built on how often it rains rather than how hard. Sun is down to 7 hours inside 12.7 of daylight and humidity is up at 83 percent. The record: a dew point of 11C and AQI 39.
Add your own note from Manchester's card on the map.