Massachusetts Air Quality & Wildfire Smoke
Live AQI for 1 Massachusetts city, plus statewide air-quality alerts. Data from AirNow (U.S. EPA).
Wildfire smoke in Massachusetts
Smoke risk across Massachusetts concentrates in June through early August, driven by long-range transport from Quebec and Ontario, which arrives as a regional haze rather than a local plume.
We currently track one city in Massachusetts. Its reading is for that monitoring area only and should not be read as a statewide figure.
Each city page below shows AirNow's reported AQI on the 2024 EPA breakpoints, with the reporting monitor and the observation time — see how we calculate AQI. Statewide watches and warnings come from the National Weather Service and appear at the top of this page when active.
The 675,647 people we track in Massachusetts are all in the Boston area, so this page is effectively that metro's page with a wider lens. For the rest of Massachusetts, the nearest tracked reading in a bordering state is usually the better proxy than a number from the opposite corner.
Cross-border check: the nearest city we track outside Massachusetts is Providence, RI, about 41 miles southwest of Boston. Smoke does not stop at state lines — when a plume covers that city's monitors, Massachusetts's edge nearest it is usually seeing the same air.
Our next-nearest tracked readings sit in Hartford, CT (92 mi southwest) and Portland, ME (99 mi northeast) — useful second opinions when Massachusetts's own reading looks odd, and the honest picture of how coarse national smoke coverage is at this resolution.
About our Boston coverage
Boston is one of the Massachusetts cities we track, with a population of about 675,647, in Suffolk County.
A city this size carries its own year-round PM2.5 baseline from traffic, construction and industry, so wildfire smoke here arrives on top of an existing load rather than against clean background air. That matters for reading the number: a moderate AQI in Boston on a smoke-free week is normal, and the same AQI during a plume means considerably more smoke than it would somewhere with a lower floor.
Smoke risk here concentrates in June through early August, driven by long-range transport from Quebec and Ontario, which arrives as a regional haze rather than a local plume. Outside that window an elevated reading in Boston is more likely to be local — traffic, dust, or a temperature inversion holding everyday pollution near the ground — than wildfire smoke, and the dominant pollutant shown above is what tells the two apart.
For smoke preparation that applies anywhere — filtration, masks, a clean room — see our wildfire-smoke health guide and the clean-room setup.