Weather Overview for Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill

The Triangle region of North Carolina boasts moderate winter temperatures and beautiful fall and spring weather. Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill's weather is one of the reasons we so often appear on lists of the best places to live and retire. While the summer season certainly sees it's share of high temperatures and humidity, people who relocate here from colder regions seem to love the temperature.

The official chart of average temperatures and precipitation by month is below, but here's what the numbers don't tell you. First, April and October are the absolute best months of the year. The sky is bright blue, the humidity is non-existent and all you want to do is be outdoors. In terms of the heat and humidity, Memorial Day weekend generally kicks off the hot and humid weather. You can pretty much count on it being super hot and sticky from the Fourth of July until the second or third week in September. And then the heat suddenly breaks and we get the beautiful Fall weather that leads into October.

We do get beautiful fall colors in the Triangle, and you can generally get away with just a sweater or light jacket all the way until Thanksgiving. Even once the "winter" weather sets in, it almost never stays below freezing all day. It might snow in Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill five or six times a year, but the snow generally only sticks two or three of those times. When it does snow and stick, expect everything to shut down. Actually, everything shuts down even when it just threatens to snow because in most of our counties the school buses don't run in the snow. So we have a lot more snow days than actual snow.

While the weather table says January is wetter than February, that's probably only by volume and not the number of days. February here is pretty gray with a lot of mist precipitation, but we always seem to get one weekend right in the middle where the sun pushes temperatures up to around 60 and all the college students switch to shorts. By March spring (and basketball) are here and everything is beautiful again.

Average Temperatures and Precipitation in Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill