Weather in Tampa in December

Prime time. If you get to pick your dates, December is the one. Highs average 22.2 °C, lows 13.3 °C, and rain falls on 7 days — nothing in the month is working against you.

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

Rain on 7 days, 2 of them heavy. Enough to need a plan B, not enough to need a plan around it. 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 28.5 °C and the coldest night fell to 0.9 °C, and the wettest single day dropped 92 mm — roughly 142% of the month's rain in one day.

This is the volatile part. December rainfall has ranged from 11 mm to 264 mm across the twenty years measured — a 253 mm spread around an average of 65 mm. The average is real but almost no individual December looks like it, so treat the figure as the middle of a wide range rather than a forecast.

Wind is light at 10.9 km/h, so the temperature on the page is close to the temperature on your skin, and humidity runs at 80%, high enough to notice on the warm days without dominating them.

How December sits in the year

The month is on the way down: 2.2 °C cooler than November, with January dropping another 2 °C. The first week and the last are not the same trip.

Daylight in December

December sits at the dark end of Tampa's year — 10.4 hours of daylight against 13.9 at midsummer, holding steady all month. Sightseeing days are genuinely shorter, and an itinerary built for summer will not fit.

An inland climate

Despite being inland, the year stays fairly even: 19.7 °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.

December in Tampa versus nearby

If Tampa is one option among several, the nearby comparison is worth making. Cape Coral is close enough to be a coin toss — within a degree on temperature, the same number of rain days. Jacksonville is close enough to be a coin toss — 2.4 °C cooler, 1 day more rain.

So: December is effectively as good as it gets here — 3 points behind November, which is inside the margin where the weather stops being the deciding factor and price starts being it.

Every month in Tampa

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