Weather in Prague in May

A good month. May is a solid month to be in Prague. Highs average 20 °C, lows 8.8 °C, and rain falls on 14 days — nothing in the month is working against you.

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

This is persistent light rain rather than storms: 14 wet days but only 1 heavy ones. It rarely cancels anything outright, and it rarely fully clears either. A jacket beats an umbrella. 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 May reaches 30 °C. Across the twenty years measured, the hottest May day reached 31.9 °C and the coldest night fell to -1.8 °C, and the wettest single day dropped 31 mm — roughly 45% of the month's rain in one day.

May is statistically steady but not small: the year-to-year variation is modest in relative terms, yet the wettest May on record still delivered 130 mm against 32 mm in the driest. In a month this wet, even a tame spread is a lot of rain in absolute terms — the 69 mm average is a reasonable planning figure, not a promise.

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 73%.

How May sits in the year

The month is on the way up: 4.5 °C warmer than April, and June 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. Rain has already shifted: 5 days more than April had.

Daylight in May

15.4 hours of daylight, gaining 1.4 hours across the month. That is between Prague's extremes of 16.4 and 8.1 hours, so days are long enough not to constrain the plan.

An inland climate

With no coast nearby, the year swings a fair way — 30.6 °C between the warmest afternoons and the coldest nights, wider than any coastal city at this latitude would manage.

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 Prague versus nearby

If Prague is one option among several, the nearby comparison is worth making. Liberec is close enough to be a coin toss — 2.2 °C cooler, the same number of rain days. Wrocław is close enough to be a coin toss — within a degree on temperature, 1 day less rain.

So: May works, with September the better month by 7 points if the dates can move. If they cannot, nothing here should stop you booking.

Every month in Prague

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