01 There is no dry season, only a less humid one
Humidity reinforces the point. The annual mean is 74.8% and the monthly minimum is July's 70.2%: not a single month of the year drops below that threshold. In February it reaches 77.8%. This is a climate that never dries out, and that constancy is what most surprises anyone arriving expecting a good season and a bad one.
What does vary is intensity. The annual total is 1,901.5 mm, but November gets 89.3 and September 236.8: a two-and-a-half-fold difference across the same number of rainy days. Put another way, in Taipei you do not choose whether it rains on you, you choose how much lands on you each time.
One nuance reorders the whole picture: Taipei is not the rainiest place in Taiwan. The national average is around 2,600 mm, comfortably above the capital's. What sets Taipei apart is not the quantity but the distribution: in the south of the island the summer monsoon concentrates 90% of annual rainfall, while in the north it delivers only 60%. That is why here it rains all year instead of in one block.
02 The meiyu: rainfall doubles in a month
From April to May rainfall goes from 101 to 225 millimetres. It is the sharpest jump in the calendar, and it has a date.
The meiyu — literally "plum rain", after the season when the fruit ripens — is the rainy season produced by a quasi-stationary front: the continental cold air mass collides with the Pacific warm mass over southern China, Taiwan and the Ryukyus, and parks there generating lows and thunderstorms.
The weather agency defines it with operational precision: it begins on the first day of a run of four or more consecutive rainy days averaging over 9 mm each. On 1949-2016 data, Taiwan enters the meiyu around 17 May, with a standard deviation of seven days, and exits in mid-June. May and June together hold 459.8 mm, 24.2% of the annual rainfall in two months.
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03 Typhoons, in real numbers
It is often repeated that Taiwan gets "about four typhoons a year", with no further precision. Counting the official warnings issued between 1991 and 2025 gives 194 typhoons in thirty-five years, that is 5.54 a year; of those, 114 had a direct-strike path over the island, which gives 3.26 a year.
The monthly distribution is very uneven: August leads with an annual average of 1.66, followed by September with 1.29 and July with 1.11. July to October holds 83.5% of all warnings. From January to March there has not been a single one in thirty-five years.
The practical conclusion lies in the variance, not the average: there were two typhoons in 2018 and ten in 2001. You cannot plan around a typhoon; you can only book with slack and accept that, travelling between July and October, there is a real chance of losing a day or two.
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04 Winter is not cold, it is grey
January is the coldest month at a mean of 16.4 °C with lows of 14.2 °C. On paper that is a pleasant temperature, and the city's all-time cold record is −0.2 °C. But Taipei's winter has a bad reputation among those who live through it, and the reason lies in two other columns of the table.
The first is sunshine: January has 76.1 hours in the whole month, about two and a half a day, barely 23% of possible sunshine. The second is humidity, at 77%. A damp cold of sixteen degrees, with no sun and no central heating in homes, feels considerably worse than a dry sixteen. Bring layers even if the thermometer does not justify them.
05 November, and why
The best window is November, and the figures leave little room for argument: it is the driest month of the year at 89.3 mm, the average high is 24.8 °C and the low 19.7, humidity drops to 75% and typhoon season is effectively over.
December follows closely, with 96.9 mm and a mean of 18.2 °C: a little cooler, just as dry and with fewer people. April is the best option in the first half of the year, right before the meiyu arrives. October works as a transition, with 162.6 mm and the chance of a late typhoon.
And one note that applies to any month: it is considerably cooler in the mountains around the city. Yangmingshan averages 10.3 °C in January against the basin's 16.4, six degrees of difference half an hour away by bus. If you go up, go up warm even if you are in shirtsleeves below.
Abishek Palraj There are 1.7 degrees between the warmest month and the coolest.
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Joost Rooijmans It thunders here 167 days a year.
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Jeon Han — Korea.net / Korean Culture and Information Service