# New Jersey air quality today — live AQI by metro > Source: https://breathecheck.com/air-quality/us/new-jersey/ > Live AQI for 2 New Jersey metros, updated hourly from EPA AirNow. Where the state's air is worst right now, and how far apart its cities are. # New Jersey air quality today Updated 14 Sep 2026, 22:12 UTC · LIVE 2 metros tracked Across the 2 New Jersey metros BreatheCheck measures, air is worst right now in Newark at AQI 24 (Good) and cleanest in Jersey City at AQI 24 . ## Which New Jersey city has the worst air quality right now? | # | Metro | AQI | UV now | Dominant | | 1 | Newark no page yet | 24 Good | 0.3 | O3 | | 2 | Jersey City no page yet | 24 Good | 0.3 | O3 | ## What is the UV index in New Jersey today? The strongest UV in New Jersey today is 5.9 (High) in Newark, arriving around 1pm local time. The mildest of the 2 metros we model here peaks at 5.9 in Jersey City. UV is modelled, not measured — unlike the AQI above it, which comes off an instrument. How we handle UV → ## Nonattainment statewide, split across two airsheds Every part of New Jersey is designated nonattainment for the federal ozone standard, and the state’s Department of Environmental Protection describes that designation as two separate sections, each one crossing a state line — the northern into the New York area, the southwestern into Philadelphia’s. The state sits inside two other cities’ airsheds, at the dense end of both. Its ozone season runs March 1 to October 31; six of the fifteen monitoring stations operate only within it, and the department writes a morning forecast against it that goes out through EnviroFlash. In Newark the sources stack rather than spread. The Ironbound neighborhood holds the Passaic Valley sewage treatment plant, a municipal waste incinerator and the Diamond Alkali Superfund site where Agent Orange was manufactured, in the space between the New Jersey Turnpike, the port of Newark and Newark Liberty, with the diesel drayage those generate moving through the middle of it. New Jersey’s response to that concentration was legislative. The environmental justice law signed in September 2020 made New Jersey the first state to require its environmental agency to deny permits for new polluting facilities in designated overburdened communities unless a compelling public interest is shown. It reaches major air sources, incinerators and resource recovery facilities, sludge processing, and sewage plants above 50 million gallons a day; the implementing rule took effect in 2023 and the statute is still being fought over in court. Whether it changes what the monitors read is a question the record here is too short to answer. ## Where do these New Jersey readings come from? 2 of the 2 metros here report from a named regulatory monitor — Northeast Urban, Northeast Urban. The dominant pollutant across New Jersey today is O3 . We track 2 metropolitan areas in New Jersey, not the whole state, and none of them has its own page yet — we publish a metro page where searches for it clear a floor, and none here does, though every one is measured hourly. There is no state-wide average here on purpose: averaging 2 metros into one figure would invent a value for all the ground between them. How we measure, and what we refuse to estimate → ## Neighbouring states Smoke and inversions do not stop at a state line, so when New Jersey looks wrong the answer is often next door. ## Related Updated 14 Sep 2026, 22:12 UTC