Right now: Memphis is at 52, moderate.
Is the air safe to breathe in Memphis today?
In Memphis, BreatheCheck reads 52 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 freight hub that runs at night
By landed weight Memphis International is the second-largest cargo airport in the United States, behind Anchorage, and the FedEx Express hub built around it does the bulk of its sorting between late evening and dawn. Diesel here does not follow a commuter clock. The corridors feeding the airport, and the four road and rail bridges carrying traffic across the Mississippi, stay loaded through hours when most metros have gone quiet, releasing a share of the day’s combustion into the shallow, stable layer that forms overnight rather than into an afternoon that would mix it away.
Terrain gives that nothing to work with and nothing to fight. Downtown stands on the fourth Chickasaw Bluff, 50 to 200 feet above the floodplain, and past the bluff line the ground is flat in every direction. With no basin to hold air, the worst PM2.5 stretches here are stagnation rather than inversion: a slow, humid high sitting over the Delta with nothing to move what the corridors put out.
Fall adds a source from across the river. Rice fields in the Arkansas Delta are burned after harvest under a smoke management plan that is voluntary rather than a permit regime, and satellite work on Mississippi County, Arkansas has tracked the resulting PM2.5 plumes directly. One further complication is jurisdictional. The metro straddles Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas, so a single airshed sits under three state agencies at once.
Where this number sits
Of the 121 US metros reporting to us right now, Memphis is number 23 and number 2 of the 2 we track in Tennessee. The pollutant driving it today is PM2.5.
Nearby metros we also measure, and what they read at the same hour:
- Little Rock, AR — 130 miles away, AQI 63
- Jackson, MS — 197 miles away, AQI 53
- Nashville, TN — 197 miles away, AQI 74
- Huntsville, AL — 198 miles away, AQI 52
Where this reading comes from
AirNow’s Memphis reporting area, about 4.1 miles from the metro centre.
What has air quality in Memphis actually been?
12 of the 28 days we have recorded so far went above AQI 100.
| Date | Daily max AQI | EPA band | Hours read |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 | Moderate | 21 | |
| 100 | Moderate | 22 | |
| 90 | Moderate | 22 | |
| 71 | Moderate | 22 | |
| 74 | Moderate | 22 | |
| 174 | Unhealthy | 22 | |
| 182 | Unhealthy | 22 | |
| 48 | Good | 22 | |
| 80 | Moderate | 22 | |
| 84 | Moderate | 22 | |
| 97 | Moderate | 22 | |
| 133 | Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups | 23 | |
| 105 | Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups | 22 | |
| 84 | Moderate | 22 | |
| 67 | Moderate | 22 | |
| 133 | Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups | 22 | |
| 122 | Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups | 22 | |
| 60 | Moderate | 21 | |
| 64 | Moderate | 22 | |
| 115 | Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups | 22 | |
| 156 | Unhealthy | 22 | |
| 151 | Unhealthy | 21 | |
| 71 | Moderate | 21 | |
| 100 | Moderate | 23 | |
| 101 | Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups | 23 | |
| 101 | Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups | 23 | |
| 87 | Moderate | 9 — partial day | |
| 129 | Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups | 2 — partial day |
Questions about Memphis
What is the air quality in Memphis right now?
Which monitor does this number come from?
How does Memphis compare with metros nearby?
Does this include pollen?
Put this number in context
Updated