Weather in Kristiansand in May

Shoulder season. May is shoulder season in Kristiansand — cheaper, quieter, and a genuine gamble. Highs sit at 12.1 °C and the day is short; this is an indoors-with-excursions month, not an outdoors-all-day one.

May ranks 5 of 12 in Kristiansand: past the worst of the year but short of July, which is the month to book if the dates are open.

Rain on 12 days, 2 of them heavy. Enough to need a plan B, not enough to need a plan around it. Layers, and a genuinely waterproof outer — at 12.1 °C the difference between a good day and a miserable one is entirely down to what you are wearing.

What the averages hide

Averages flatten a month, and this one hides a few things: the day barely swings — 3.7 °C between the overnight low and the afternoon high. Across the twenty years measured, the hottest May day reached 21.8 °C and the coldest night fell to 2.2 °C, and the wettest single day dropped 32 mm — roughly 42% of the month's rain in one day.

May is moderately variable: 15 mm in the driest year against 148 mm in the wettest, around an average of 76 mm. Roughly two Mays in three land near that average, and the third does something else entirely.

Wind is light at 11.8 km/h, so the temperature on the page is close to the temperature on your skin, and humidity runs at 82%, which at 12.1 °C means damp rather than muggy — the kind of cold that gets into a coat and stays there.

How May sits in the year

The month is on the way up: 4.1 °C warmer than April, and June adds another 3.7 °C. Late in the month feels noticeably different from the start of it, which is worth knowing if the trip is short.

Daylight in May

16.7 hours of daylight, gaining 2.1 hours across the month. That is between Kristiansand's extremes of 18.2 and 6.5 hours, so days are long enough not to constrain the plan.

Sea temperature

The sea sits at about 9.4 °C in May — too cold to swim without a wetsuit. The sea peaks at 16.9 °C in August and bottoms out at 5.3 °C — water lags the air by a month or two, which is why the best swimming often comes after the best weather.

How busy it gets

Busy. Popular without being frantic; book the things you care about, improvise the rest.

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

May in Kristiansand versus nearby

If Kristiansand is one option among several, the nearby comparison is worth making. Stavanger is close enough to be a coin toss — within a degree on temperature, 3 days more rain. Gothenburg is close enough to be a coin toss — within a degree on temperature, the same number of rain days.

So: May works, with July the better month by 15 points if the dates can move. If they cannot, nothing here should stop you booking.

Every month in Kristiansand

See all twelve months in Kristiansand, or where else to go in May.