The Best Time to Visit Orlando, Month by Month

There is no single best time to visit Orlando, and any article that hands you one month is answering a different question from the one you asked. What there is: a hot, wet half of the year and a mild, dry half, a hurricane season with a published window and a published peak, and a crowd calendar set almost entirely by when American schools are shut.

This guide goes month by month. Every temperature and rainfall figure below is a NOAA 1991–2020 climate normal for Orlando International Airport — a thirty-year average, not last year's weather — and each month also says what it is like in a house with a private pool.

The short answer

For the most comfortable weather, come between November and April. Normal daily highs sit at about 72°F to 84°F, and every one of those months averages under three and a half inches of rain. November is the driest month of the entire year at 1.79 inches.

If you are tied to school holidays you are coming in summer, and summer here is hot: normal highs of 90.8°F in June, 92.0°F in July and 91.6°F in August, with overnight lows in the low 70s. It is also the wet season — roughly 72% of Orlando's annual rainfall arrives between May and October. None of that ruins a holiday. It changes how you shape the day.

One thing this page will not do is tell you what a stay costs in any given month. That is a question for us, with your dates in front of us. What it can tell you is when Orlando is hot, when it is wet and when it is busy, which is what the question is reaching for.

The parks themselves are the constant — our guide to Walt Disney World covers what sits where — but opening hours are published by Disney and revised through the year, so check Disney's own calendar rather than any article.

Winter: December to February

The dry season at its best, crowds that arrive in two sharp spikes rather than steadily, and the part of the year when an unheated pool becomes a problem.

December

Normal high 73.8°F, normal low 52.9°F, 2.48 inches of rain. Cool, bright and comfortable for a full day on your feet. The first half of the month is usually quieter, though the holiday season is already under way; the last ten days are among the busiest, because the school winter break runs roughly a fortnight across Christmas and New Year. December evenings want a jumper, and most guests want the pool heated.

January

Normal high 71.8°F, normal low 49.5°F, 2.48 inches. The coolest month of the Orlando year, and by Florida standards genuinely cold after dark. The days are pleasant, and once the holidays end the middle of the month is typically one of the quieter windows the city gets. In most years, heating is what makes the pool usable.

February

Normal high 74.9°F, normal low 52.4°F, and 2.04 inches — the second driest month of the year. A few degrees warmer than January, just as dry, with the same cool evenings. The best month of the year for anyone who does not cope well with heat.

Spring: March to May

The best all-round weather of the year, followed by the month the calendar turns against you.

March

Normal high 78.9°F, normal low 55.8°F, 3.03 inches. Warm days, cool nights, still firmly inside the dry season. It is also spring break: Orange County's own schools take a week of it in March and American districts stagger theirs across the weeks either side, so March is busy in a way February is not. Travel in the first days of the month and you get the weather without the company.

April

Normal high 83.6°F, normal low 60.7°F, 2.58 inches. For a lot of people this is the sweet spot — properly warm, still dry, and the first month since autumn when the pool is comfortable without help. Late April, after the spring-break weeks and before the American summer, tends to be one of the quiet gaps.

May

Normal high 88.4°F, normal low 66.3°F, 4.02 inches. The turn. Rainfall jumps by more than half on April because May opens the wet season, and the heat arrives with it. Still a strong month, and the last before the parks and the water parks fill up for the summer.

Summer: June to August

Hot, humid, wet and full. This is when most families with school-age children can actually travel, so it is worth describing plainly.

June

Normal high 90.8°F, normal low 71.6°F — and 8.05 inches of rain, the wettest month of the year. The National Weather Service describes Florida's May-to-October wet season as dominated by daily sea-breeze thunderstorms fuelled by solar heating, and that mechanism matters: storms build through the afternoon, break hard, and clear. It is not all-day drizzle. The hurricane season opens on 1 June, which means far less then than it will in September.

July

Normal high 92.0°F, normal low 73.2°F, 7.46 inches. The hottest month. Between roughly midday and four the heat, not the queue, is the obstacle to a park day — which is when a private pool earns its keep: park in the morning, water at the house in the afternoon, back out in the evening. Our guide to indoor Orlando on a wet day is as much a heat guide as a rain guide in July.

August

Normal high 91.6°F, normal low 73.7°F, 7.69 inches. Marginally cooler than July by day and the warmest month of the year at night, which is the part visitors underestimate — it does not cool down after dark. From mid-August the hurricane season enters its most active stretch. American schools go back through the month, so the last week or two is usually calmer than the first.

Autumn: September to November

The most underrated stretch of the Orlando year, and the one carrying the sharpest trade-off.

September

Normal high 89.6°F, normal low 72.4°F, 6.37 inches. Still hot, still wet, and the statistical peak of the Atlantic hurricane season falls on 10 September. With the schools back it is also, typically, one of the calmer months in the parks. That is the trade, stated honestly: the quieter weeks of the warm half of the year usually sit inside the month with the highest storm risk.

October

Normal high 84.7°F, normal low 66.2°F, 3.46 inches. The relief month. Heat and rain both fall away sharply, the pool is still comfortable unheated, and the hurricane season's active stretch runs out around mid-month. One of the strongest all-round months of the year.

November

Normal high 78.3°F, normal low 58.2°F, and 1.79 inches — the driest month in Orlando, by a clear margin. Comfortable days, cool evenings, the dry season properly back. The first three weeks are usually quiet; Thanksgiving week, at the end of the month, is one of the four big peaks of the year. Pool heating returns to the list.

Hurricane season, honestly

The Atlantic hurricane season runs from 1 June to 30 November. NOAA's National Hurricane Center puts the climatological peak on 10 September, with most activity occurring between mid-August and mid-October. Those are the facts. Everything else anyone tells you about it is interpretation.

What the window is not is a forecast. It is a six-month season covering the whole Atlantic basin, and most of it passes without a storm affecting central Florida. Orlando is inland rather than coastal, a real difference from a beach holiday — and if a day on the coast is part of the plan, our guide to the beaches near Orlando covers which ones are worth the drive.

What it does mean is that a trip between mid-August and mid-October deserves two unglamorous precautions: insure it, and follow the National Hurricane Center rather than a fourteen-day app. The National Weather Service issues a hurricane watch 48 hours, and a warning 36 hours, before tropical-storm-force winds are expected to arrive.

School holidays and crowds

Orlando's busiest weeks are not its best-weather weeks. They are the weeks American schools are shut, and that shape repeats even though the dates move. The Orange County Public Schools calendar shows that shape clearly: a week off at Thanksgiving, roughly a fortnight spanning Christmas and New Year, a spring-break week in March, and the long summer holiday from late May to mid-August.

Four peaks, then — spring break, summer, Thanksgiving week, and Christmas to New Year — and everything else is a gap. The three that usually help most are late January into early February, late April into early May, and September into early November. That last one is the prize: it overlaps with the driest month of the year.

Two caveats. American districts break at slightly different times, so spring break typically spreads across several weeks in March and early April rather than landing in one. And be careful with crowd calendars: Disney publishes its park hours and revises them through the year, while the crowd levels you see elsewhere are somebody's estimate. Check the calendar for your dates, and treat a crowd number as the estimate it is.

Which month for you

Same year, six different answers.

• Best weather, no other constraints — November first, then March and April. November is the driest month of the year and its first three weeks are usually quiet.
• Travelling with school-age children — you are coming in summer, so plan around the heat rather than fighting it: park mornings, pool afternoons, something indoors in reserve for the four o'clock storm.
• A group with nobody in school — late January into early February, or late April into early May. Cooler, drier, usually calmer, and the gaps most people never think to use.
• You want the pool to be the holiday — May to October, when the normal overnight low never falls below 66°F and an unheated pool is comfortable. Outside that window, ask us about heating before you book.
• Christmas in Florida — eyes open: the last ten days of December are one of the four busiest weeks of the year and the evenings are genuinely cool. Book early, and heat the pool.
• Watching the hurricane season — travel outside mid-August to mid-October if you can. If you cannot, insure the trip and follow the National Hurricane Center.

Whichever month you land on, what changes an Orlando holiday most is not the weather — it is having somewhere to retreat to at two in the afternoon. You can browse the homes we manage with a private pool, and if you are still building the trip around the forecast, our what else there is to do around Orlando is the place to start.