Right now: Baltimore is at 37, good.
Is the air safe to breathe in Baltimore today?
In Baltimore, BreatheCheck reads 37 as Go. The cutoffs: go below 101, keep it short and easy from 101 to 150, move it indoors above 150. These are our own thresholds, drawn on the EPA bands — EPA itself classifies 101–150 as Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups and does not tell you how long to stay out.
Go AQI 0–100
Normal outdoor plans. No change needed.
Short & unloaded AQI 101–150
A 20-minute dog walk, not a 2.5-hour run. Keep it brief and easy.
Don’t go AQI 151+
Move it indoors. Above 200 that becomes everyone, not just sensitive groups.
Above 200 this stops being a personal call: everyone indoors.
Duration and intensity are two separate dials
| Under 20 min | 20–60 min | Over an hour | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Easy | Go | Go | Go |
| Moderate | Go | Go | Go |
| Hard | Go | Go | Go |
Go Every combination lands the same way at this reading — a hard hour is no different from an easy twenty minutes. The two dials separate above 80.
Where people actually draw the line
All the thresholds people reported, and who reported them
- 60 Asthmatic runnerone runner’s own 156-run log
- 75–100 Daycare / schoolparents and staff in one r/toddlers thread, Aug 2025 — not a published rule
- 100 Parentcommunity-reported, escalating at 150 and 200
- 110 Runnercommunity-reported
If you’re staying in, filter the room you’re actually in
A coal pier four blocks from the houses
Baltimore’s most measurable local source sits at the far southern end of the city. Curtis Bay is a residential grid about four blocks wide and fifteen long, built on sloping heights and wrapped on its northeast, east and southeast sides by a dredged deep-water channel and the industry along it: a coal export terminal on the water, the Coast Guard Yard, rail lines and the truck traffic feeding them.
Monitoring run by residents with Johns Hopkins researchers documented coal dust leaving the terminal’s fence line at intervals of roughly an hour and a half, and coal particles turning up as much as three-quarters of a mile into the streets behind it. That is a scale nothing metro-wide can represent. Two Baltimore neighborhoods a few miles apart are not breathing the same air on the same afternoon, and one monitor speaks for both of them.
The rest of the city’s load is what a working port produces: terminal equipment and the ships waiting on it, I-95 and I-895 diving under the harbor in tunnels, the Beltway around the outside. What sets Curtis Bay apart is not that it has an industrial neighbor. It is the distance involved, which is measured in city blocks.
Where this number sits
Of the 121 US metros reporting to us right now, Baltimore is number 70 and the highest of the 2 we track in Maryland. The pollutant driving it today is O3.
Nearby metros we also measure, and what they read at the same hour:
- Washington, DC — 35 miles away, AQI 42
- Frederick, MD — 44 miles away, AQI 33
- Dover, DE — 59 miles away, AQI 37
- Wilmington, DE — 65 miles away, AQI 31
Where this reading comes from
AirNow’s Metro Baltimore reporting area, about 7.2 miles from the metro centre.
What has air quality in Baltimore actually been?
0 of the 30 days we have recorded so far went above AQI 100.
| Date | Daily max AQI | EPA band | Hours read |
|---|---|---|---|
| 48 | Good | 22 | |
| 41 | Good | 23 | |
| 49 | Good | 23 | |
| 44 | Good | 23 | |
| 56 | Moderate | 23 | |
| 74 | Moderate | 23 | |
| 52 | Moderate | 23 | |
| 46 | Good | 23 | |
| 51 | Moderate | 23 | |
| 52 | Moderate | 23 | |
| 54 | Moderate | 23 | |
| 52 | Moderate | 24 | |
| 59 | Moderate | 23 | |
| 68 | Moderate | 23 | |
| 65 | Moderate | 23 | |
| 51 | Moderate | 23 | |
| 41 | Good | 12 — partial day | |
| 44 | Good | 22 | |
| 57 | Moderate | 23 | |
| 56 | Moderate | 23 | |
| 57 | Moderate | 23 | |
| 57 | Moderate | 24 | |
| 42 | Good | 23 | |
| 53 | Moderate | 23 | |
| 53 | Moderate | 23 | |
| 60 | Moderate | 23 | |
| 54 | Moderate | 23 | |
| 52 | Moderate | 23 | |
| 53 | Moderate | 26 | |
| 52 | Moderate | 7 — partial day |
Questions about Baltimore
What is the air quality in Baltimore right now?
Which monitor does this number come from?
How does Baltimore compare with metros nearby?
Does this include pollen?
Put this number in context
Updated