Weather in Richmond in August

Prime time. If you get to pick your dates, August is the one. Highs average 21.5 °C, lows 15.1 °C, and rain falls on 5 days — nothing in the month is working against you.

August ranks 2 of 12 in Richmond. Only July scores clearly higher, and the difference is small enough to be settled by price rather than weather.

Rain falls on only 5 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 August reaches 30 °C. Across the twenty years measured, the hottest August day reached 31 °C and the coldest night fell to 10.4 °C, and the wettest single day dropped 31 mm — roughly 94% of the month's rain in one day.

This is the volatile part. August rainfall has ranged from 6 mm to 90 mm across the twenty years measured — a 84 mm spread around an average of 33 mm. The average is real but almost no individual August looks like it, so treat the figure as the middle of a wide range rather than a forecast.

Wind is light at 3.4 km/h, so the temperature on the page is close to the temperature on your skin, and humidity runs at 75%, high enough to notice on the warm days without dominating them.

How August sits in the year

Temperatures hold steady either side: 21.4 °C in July, 21.5 here, 18.2 in September. Nothing about the timing within the month matters much. Rain is the thing that moves: September brings 6 days more of it, so the earlier half of a flexible trip is the safer half.

Daylight in August

13.7 hours of daylight, losing 1 hours across the month. That is between Richmond's extremes of 14.7 and 9.6 hours, so days are long enough not to constrain the plan.

An inland climate

Despite being inland, the year stays fairly even: 18.7 °C between the year's warmest afternoons and coldest nights.

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.

August in Richmond versus nearby

If Richmond is one option among several, the nearby comparison is worth making. Virginia Beach is the weaker option in August — 7.8 °C warmer, 10 days more rain. Washington is the weaker option in August — 9.1 °C warmer, 8 days more rain.

So: August is effectively as good as it gets here — 1 points behind July, which is inside the margin where the weather stops being the deciding factor and price starts being it.

Every month in Richmond

See all twelve months in Richmond, or where else to go in August.