Mexico has two seasons rather than four: a dry season from roughly November to May (cool and clear until February, then hot from March) and a rainy season from about June to October, which is also hurricane season on both coasts. Within that pattern, altitude decides the temperature, so Mexico City at about 2,240 m stays mild all year while Cancún and Acapulco stay hot.
Popocatépetl, about 5,400 m high and roughly 70 km from central Mexico City, can freeze in any month while the beaches of Guerrero stay in the mid-20s °C. Spring, summer, autumn and winter mean little in most of Mexico; rain and height are what change.
November to February: Clear Skies, Cold Fronts and the Norte
The dry season opens in late October or November, once the summer rains have shut off over the central highlands. High pressure settles over the country, skies clear, and humidity falls. This is the coolest part of the year almost everywhere. In Mexico City, January afternoons usually reach about 21–22 °C, but nights fall to around 6 °C. With no cloud to hold in heat, frost is common in the suburbs higher up and on the valley floors around Toluca and Puebla.
The main weather events of these months come from the north. Cold fronts from the United States push down the Gulf of Mexico, and Mexicans call the strong winds that follow them nortes. When a norte arrives, Veracruz and Tampico can lose 10 °C in a few hours, gusts close the port of Veracruz, and grey drizzle hangs over the Gulf slope for days. The same surges funnel through the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and emerge on the Pacific side as the tehuano gale. Even the Yucatán gets the odd cool, windy day, when lows in Mérida drop to about 15 °C.
The far northwest is the exception. Tijuana and Ensenada have a Mediterranean-type climate, and they get most of their roughly 200–250 mm of annual rain between December and March from Pacific storms, the same systems that water southern California. The high Sierra Madre Occidental in Chihuahua and Durango gets snow most winters. In the capital it almost never snows: the snowfall of 11 January 1967 is still remembered because nobody alive had seen one before.
March to May: The Hottest Weeks Come Before the Rain
In much of Mexico the hottest weeks of the year come in spring, not July. With the sun climbing towards overhead and no cloud cover yet, temperatures rise steadily from March. Mexico City usually records its warmest afternoons in April and May, with highs around 26–27 °C. In the Yucatán, Mérida commonly passes 35 °C in May, and the interior of the peninsula is hotter than the coast at Cancún or Progreso, which get sea breezes.
The land is now at its driest. Stubble burning and forest fires peak in April and May, and Mexico City's ozone is usually at its worst, often triggering environmental contingencies that restrict car use. Holy Week (Semana Santa), in March or April, is the peak domestic holiday, and the weather is almost always dry.
June to October: Afternoon Storms, the Canícula and Hurricanes
The rainy season starts in late May or June and lasts until about October. It is driven by warm, moist air flowing in from the Gulf and the Caribbean as the sun reaches its highest point. In the highlands, mornings are bright and a thunderstorm breaks most afternoons, sometimes with hail heavy enough to whiten Mexico City streets. Most of the capital's yearly rain falls in four months.
The rains often weaken in the middle of the season. This is the canícula, or midsummer drought: a spell of a few weeks, usually in late July and August, when rainfall drops and the heat returns, most clearly in southern and central Mexico and along the Pacific slope. Farmers in Oaxaca and Guerrero plan their maize planting around it, because a long canícula can ruin a crop that was sown in June. Rain returns in September.
The rainy season is also hurricane season. The Atlantic season runs officially from 1 June to 30 November and the eastern Pacific season from 15 May to 30 November, and both peak from August to October. Mexico is one of the few countries exposed to both basins, and the record shows it. Hurricane Gilbert crossed the Yucatán in September 1988. Wilma stalled over Cozumel and Cancún for more than a day in October 2005. In 2023 Otis strengthened from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane in about a day before hitting Acapulco. The hurricane season guide explains why the peak comes so late in the year.
Patricia, shown above, reached sustained winds of about 345 km/h over the eastern Pacific in October 2015, the strongest ever measured by aircraft in the Western Hemisphere, before making landfall on a thinly populated stretch of the Jalisco coast.
Five Climates in One Country: Region by Region
The Altiplano and Mexico City
The central plateau, from Zacatecas south to Puebla, sits mostly between 1,500 and 2,500 m. Mexico City, at about 2,240 m, has averages of only about 14 °C in January and 18–19 °C in May, with annual rain of roughly 800 mm. Toluca, at about 2,660 m, is noticeably colder and gets frequent winter frosts. The geography of Mexico City explains why the old lake basin traps both cold air and pollution.
The Yucatán and the Caribbean coast
The peninsula is low, flat limestone with no surface rivers, and it is hot all year. Cancún's sea temperature stays around 26–29 °C. The dry season is shorter here than on the Altiplano, with rain picking up from May or June, and the coast faces the full Atlantic hurricane season. The Yucatán Peninsula also gets some winter showers from nortes.
The Pacific coast
From Mazatlán through Puerto Vallarta to Acapulco and Huatulco, winters are dry, sunny and in the high 20s °C. Summers are humid, with storms and more rain the further south you go. This coast has the most extreme split between dry and wet seasons: some months get no rain at all, and then a single tropical storm can bring hundreds of millimetres.
Baja California and the Sonoran north
The northwest is desert. Mexicali and Hermosillo regularly pass 40 °C from June to September, and Mexicali gets well under 100 mm of rain a year. Rain here comes in two forms. Pacific storms bring some in winter, and in July to September the North American Monsoon pushes humid air north over Sonora, Sinaloa and Chihuahua, setting off short, violent thunderstorms. The Sierra Madre Occidental gets the most from these storms. This is the one region where the rainy season and the hottest part of the year overlap.
Tabasco, Chiapas and the wet south
The lowlands facing the Gulf near the Isthmus are the wettest part of the country. Villahermosa averages around 2,000 mm a year, and the forested slopes of northern Chiapas get considerably more. Rain falls in every month, with nortes adding winter rain on top of the summer wet season. Rivers such as the Grijalva and Usumacinta flood often, and Tabasco's 2007 floods put most of Villahermosa under water.
Tierra Caliente, Templada, Fría: Altitude Over the Calendar
Mexicans have long described their country by height rather than season. The traditional zones, which go back to the colonial period and were later popularised by Alexander von Humboldt, are roughly:
- Tierra caliente (hot land), from sea level to about 900–1,000 m: the coasts, the Yucatán, the Balsas basin. Hot all year, with crops such as sugar cane, bananas and cacao.
- Tierra templada (temperate land), from about 1,000 to 2,000 m: Cuernavaca, Guadalajara, Oaxaca city. Warm days and mild nights, often called eternal spring. This is coffee country on the slopes of Veracruz and Chiapas.
- Tierra fría (cold land), from about 2,000 to 3,000+ m: Mexico City, Toluca, Puebla, San Cristóbal de las Casas. Cool nights, frost in winter, maize and wheat.
- Tierra helada (frozen land), above about 4,000 m: the high volcanoes, including Pico de Orizaba (about 5,600 m), Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, which keep snow on their summits.
Sources draw the boundaries differently, but the rule of thumb is that temperature falls about 6 °C for every 1,000 m of height. That is why Veracruz on the coast and Xalapa, about 1,400 m higher, are only around 100 km apart but feel like different countries in January, and why a trip from Acapulco up to Mexico City in April takes you from summer to spring. Choosing between a hot place and a cool one in Mexico is mostly a matter of choosing a height.
Mexico vs the US Southwest: Same Desert, Different Rhythm
Northern Mexico and the American Southwest share the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts and the same monsoon, so Hermosillo and Phoenix, or Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, have very similar years: mild winters, very hot early summers, and monsoon storms from July. Phoenix gets roughly 200 mm of rain a year, split between winter fronts and summer storms, much like Sonora.
The two diverge further south. The US Southwest has a real winter, with snow on the Colorado Plateau and freezing nights in Albuquerque. Most of Mexico lies south of the Tropic of Cancer, which crosses near Mazatlán and Ciudad Victoria. In the tropics, day length and sun angle change little through the year, so the summer rains matter more than winter cold. In the United States, January is colder than July almost everywhere. In Mexico City, January is cooler than May, but June and July are cooler than May too, because cloud and rain block the sun. That is the clearest sign that the wet-dry cycle, not winter and summer, sets the seasons.
For city-by-city figures and record temperatures, the full guide to the climate of Mexico goes station by station.