Rainy days · District of Columbia
How often does it rain in Washington, DC?
Washington’s rain falls on a lot of marble and somehow makes all of it look even more serious.
Washington, DC gets measurable rain or snow on about 118 days a year, adding up to about 42 inches.
November usually brings Washington, DC about 8 wet days and 2.9 inches. The wettest month is usually May, with about 12 wet days, and the driest is October, with about 8 wet days. That makes Washington, DC number 59 of the 129 US cities we track, rainiest first.
Last updated
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Live 48-hour check from OpenWeatherMap, refreshed about every half hour. Alerts from the National Weather Service.
Rainy days, month by month
| Month | Wet days | Inches |
|---|---|---|
| January | 10 | 2.9 |
| February | 9 | 2.6 |
| March | 11 | 3.5 |
| April | 11 | 3.2 |
| May | 12 | 3.9 |
| June | 11 | 4.2 |
| July | 11 | 4.3 |
| August | 9 | 3.3 |
| September | 9 | 3.9 |
| October | 8 | 3.7 |
| November | 8 | 2.9 |
| December | 10 | 3.4 |
Cities with about as many rainy days
- Raleigh, North Carolina: about 118 wet days a year
- Birmingham, Alabama: about 118 wet days a year
- Peoria, Illinois: about 117 wet days a year
Source: NOAA daily precipitation records for the Washington, DC area, 1991 to 2020 (at least 30 complete years behind every month), via the Applied Climate Information System. A wet day here means at least a hundredth of an inch of rain or melted snow.