Weather in Cairo in December

Prime time. If you get to pick your dates, December is the one. Highs average 21.5 °C, lows 9.8 °C, and rain falls on 1 days — nothing in the month is working against you.

December ranks 3 of 12 in Cairo. Only March scores clearly higher, and the difference is small enough to be settled by price rather than weather.

Rain falls on only 1 days, so an itinerary with no wet-weather fallback is a reasonable risk. Nothing specialised needed — this is the month you pack for the trip rather than for the weather.

What the averages hide

Averages flatten a month, and this one hides a few things: it never really gets hot: not one day in an average December reaches 30 °C. Across the twenty years measured, the hottest December day reached 33.2 °C and the coldest night fell to 2.9 °C.

December is dependably dry, and that reliability is the point: across the twenty years measured, the wettest December on record still only managed 34 mm, and the driest managed 0 mm. There is no meaningful variability to plan around, which makes this one of the few months anywhere that you can build a fixed outdoor itinerary against without a fallback. The wettest single day in twenty years of Decembers brought 24 mm. Rain simply is not the variable that decides this trip — heat, crowds and cost are.

Wind is light at 9 km/h, so the temperature on the page is close to the temperature on your skin, and humidity is unremarkable at 62%.

How December sits in the year

The month is on the way down: 5 °C cooler than November, with January dropping another 1.7 °C. The first week and the last are not the same trip.

Daylight in December

December sits at the dark end of Cairo's year — 10.2 hours of daylight against 14.1 at midsummer, holding steady all month. Sightseeing days are genuinely shorter, and an itinerary built for summer will not fit.

An inland climate

With no coast nearby, the year swings a fair way — 31.8 °C between the warmest afternoons and the coldest nights, wider than any coastal city at this latitude would manage.

How busy it gets

Peak season. Expect the highest prices of the year and to be booking well ahead.

Crowd levels are estimated from climate desirability and school-holiday calendars, not from visitor numbers.

December in Cairo versus nearby

If Cairo is one option among several, the nearby comparison is worth making. Port Said is the weaker option in December — 2.4 °C cooler, 5 days more rain. Alexandria is close enough to be a coin toss — within a degree on temperature, 4 days more rain.

So: December is effectively as good as it gets here — 0 points behind March, which is inside the margin where the weather stops being the deciding factor and price starts being it.

Every month in Cairo

See all twelve months in Cairo, or where else to go in December.