Weather in Lyon in March

Shoulder season. March sits in between. You will get good days and you will lose some. Highs sit at 13.3 °C and the day is short; this is an indoors-with-excursions month, not an outdoors-all-day one.

March ranks 8 of 12 in Lyon: past the worst of the year but short of September, which is the month to book if the dates are open.

Rain on 11 days, 1 of them heavy. Enough to need a plan B, not enough to need a plan around it. Layers, and a genuinely waterproof outer — at 13.3 °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: 6 nights fall below freezing. Across the twenty years measured, the hottest March day reached 23.1 °C and the coldest night fell to -10.5 °C.

March is moderately variable: 7 mm in the driest year against 110 mm in the wettest, around an average of 54 mm. Roughly two Marchs in three land near that average, and the third does something else entirely.

Wind is light at 9.3 km/h, so the temperature on the page is close to the temperature on your skin, and humidity runs at 81%, which at 13.3 °C means damp rather than muggy — the kind of cold that gets into a coat and stays there.

How March sits in the year

The month is on the way up: 4.6 °C warmer than February, and April adds another 4.1 °C. Late in the month feels noticeably different from the start of it, which is worth knowing if the trip is short.

Daylight in March

11.8 hours of daylight, gaining 1.6 hours across the month. That is between Lyon's extremes of 15.7 and 8.7 hours, so days are long enough not to constrain the plan.

An inland climate

With no coast nearby, the year swings a fair way — 27.8 °C between the warmest afternoons and the coldest nights, wider than any coastal city at this latitude would manage.

How busy it gets

Shoulder. The value months — prices ease off and you get the place closer to itself.

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

March in Lyon versus nearby

If Lyon is one option among several, the nearby comparison is worth making. Annecy is the weaker option in March — 2.3 °C cooler, 1 day more rain. Chamonix-Mont-Blanc is the weaker option in March — 8.1 °C cooler, 3 days more rain.

So: March is a compromise. September is 24 points better and is what Lyon is actually like at its best — worth moving the trip for if that is possible, and worth adjusting expectations for if it is not.

Every month in Lyon

See all twelve months in Lyon, or where else to go in March.