Port Vila month by month, at a glance
Hover each month for the summary. Click to pin it.
In Port Vila the temperature decides nothing. The lowest mean maximum of the year is 26.4 degrees, in July; the highest is 31.3, in January. Less than five degrees of range across twelve months. The minima move between 18.0 and 23.0. With numbers like that, any month is “good weather” and none of them entirely is: this city's calendar is written by the water that falls and the wind that might arrive.
01 From 320 millimetres to 87
The rain does move, and a great deal. March delivers 320.9 millimetres spread over 18.5 rain days. September delivers 87.3 over 8.1 days. That is almost four times less water on fewer than half the days. Between the two lies a steady decline that begins in April and bottoms out at the end of August.
The annual total is 2,338.9 millimetres over 153.7 rain days: on average it rains more than four days out of ten. That figure matters more than the monthly mean, because in the wet months rain is not an afternoon shower but a regime: in March there is water three days out of every five.
Humidity follows. April is the heaviest month, averaging 87 per cent; September the most breathable, at 80. Seven points does not sound like much on paper, but at a constant thirty degrees it is the difference between walking through the city at midday and not wanting to.
02 The most overcast month is not the wettest
There is an asymmetry here worth knowing. The month with the fewest hours of sunshine is not March, the wettest, but February: 155.4 hours against January's 220.1. It is a month of low, persistent cloud rather than downpours, with barely over five hours of sun a day.
October is the reverse: 198.4 hours of sunshine with only 8.4 rain days. January records more sunshine hours than October, but also 316 millimetres of water and 15.4 rain days; January sunshine is expensive. If what you want is light without water, the month is October.
03 From 1 November to 30 April
Vanuatu has an official cyclone season and it runs from November to April. Across the area — land and sea — an average of two or three tropical cyclones form or pass through each season, most frequently in January and February. Over the long run, twenty to thirty per decade, of which three to five cause severe damage.
This is not an abstract statistic. On 13 March 2015 Cyclone Pam, a category 5 system, passed with its eye wall just east of Port Vila. In 1987 it was Cyclone Uma. The meteorological department issues its tropical cyclone warning twice a day, at six in the morning and six in the evening, throughout the season.
The sensible response is not to write off those six months, since they are also when the city is greenest and cheapest. The sensible response is insurance that covers weather cancellations, no tight flight connections, and accepting that in January or February one day of the trip may be lost entirely.
Key moments at a glance
87.3 mm over 8.1 rain days and the year's lowest humidity, 80 per cent.
198.4 hours of sunshine, 8.4 rain days and the Fest'Napuan festival.
155.4 hours of sunshine, half of January's, and peak cyclone season.
320.9 mm over 18.5 days. Cyclone Pam came through on a 13 March.
04 September and October, if you get to choose
July and August are already dry: 94.4 and 87.4 millimetres. But July also brings the year's lowest minima, 18.2 degrees, and nights when a rain jacket is more useful than swimming shorts. September holds the dryness — 87.3 millimetres — drops humidity to its annual low and warms up slightly. October adds the sunshine.
October has an argument that is not in the climate table: Fest'Napuan, the country's largest music festival, is held that month at Saralana Park beside the waterfront, and entry is free. It has run since 1996 and programmes musicians from Vanuatu and the wider Pacific over several consecutive nights. The exact dates change every year, so confirm them before booking flights.
You are not choosing between cold and hot here. You are choosing between eighty-seven millimetres of water and three hundred and twenty.
05 What the market shows
The municipal market is where the calendar becomes visible. The root crops — yam, taro, sweet potato — are there all year, because they are the country's staple and do not depend on the season. What changes is the fruit: mangoes arrive in November and passion fruit concentrates between March and May, which is to say in the middle of the wet season.
The building was badly damaged by the earthquake of 17 December 2024 and stayed shut for more than seven months. It was repaired and reopened on 28 July 2025, with some thirty to forty vendors back; the cooked-food section took longer because of the repairs it needed. During the closure most of the vendors moved to the Seaside market.
06 The honest summary
If the trip can go wherever you want it, put it between late August and late October: dry, bright, outside cyclone season and with the festival at the end. If you can only travel in the southern summer, the destination still works — it is warm, everything is green, there are fewer people — in exchange for frequent rain, closed skies in February and a real cyclone risk between January and March.
What makes no sense is choosing the month by temperature. In Port Vila, twelve consecutive months are the same warm, humid day repeated; the only thing that genuinely changes is how much water falls on it.
