Weekly note
Detroit: a large body of water with a city in the background

Detroit in May

sweet spot · the best month to go

The year in Detroit

Tap a month for its page

  1. Detroit in January: avoid
  2. Detroit in February: avoid
  3. Detroit in March: ok
  4. Detroit in April: good
  5. Detroit in May: sweet spot
  6. Detroit in June: sweet spot
  7. Detroit in July: good, busy
  8. Detroit in August: good, busy
  9. Detroit in September: sweet spot
  10. Detroit in October: good
  11. Detroit in November: ok
  12. Detroit in December: avoid
  • Sweet spot
  • Good
  • OK
  • Avoid
  • Busy
May at Detroit is 20°C by day and 10°C at night, with 10 rainy days and about 10 hours of sun a day. 20C max, 10 rainy days.

The numbers

Daily high20°C
Nightly low10°C
Feels like, afternoon19°C
Rainy days, 1 mm or more10 · 86 mm
Humidity68%
Sunshine10.0 h/day
Daylight14.6 h/day
Crowds100 / 100, higher is quieter

Ten-year averages for this calendar month. A rainy day is one with at least 1 mm of rain, as a weather station counts it. The model these figures come from drizzles more than a rain gauge, the more so the warmer the month, so its days count from 2 mm, rising to 5 mm in the hottest.

Weather read at Campus Martius, downtown, 28 km from the airport (DTW): ten years of ERA5 and ERA5-Land reanalysis, through Open-Meteo's open data.

How busy it gets

May: about usual. Busiest in August; quietest in October.

Public holidays in May

Holidays crowd a place out and push fares up around them; they count toward the crowd score above.

Detroit in pictures

What to pack

  • Warm layers for the evenings, which drop to about 10°C.
  • A packable rain jacket for the 10 or so rainy days.
  • Sun protection: about 10 hours of sunshine a day.

Each line is a threshold over the ten-year figures above, not advice from anywhere else.

Before you go

Type A and B plugs at 120 V. Drives on the right. The currency is the United states dollar. No UK Foreign Office advice against travel. Everything for United States: cost of living, languages, emergency numbers and health.

On arrival in Detroit: the apps, paying, getting around, tipping and the emergency numbers.

May elsewhere

In May from

The other months at Detroit

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