Tulum weather for an owner abroad

What is the weather like in Tulum through the year?

It is warm in every month and wet in most of them: normal highs run from 28.8 °C in January to 31.5 °C in July, and rain falls on 86 days a year, every month carrying at least 33 mm. What divides the year is not heat but how much rain arrives and when, and on that measure the record falls into five seasons of unequal length.

The Tulum, Mexico weather figures below come from station 23025, Tulum, of the country's National Meteorological Service, ten meters above sea level, on the 1991-2020 normal, with between 24 and 28 years of data in each column. The normal does not publish humidity for this station, so the table carries only what it measured, grouped by season; the five rainfall figures add up, without remainder, to the year.

Read the two right-hand columns together and the shape of the year is plain. The three months from September to November bring 42 percent of the rain on a third of the rainy days, and October alone, at 204.2 mm, is the wettest month. The driest stretch is March and April, with 33.0 and 40.3 mm, and even those months average four or more rainy days.

Tulum shares that calendar with the rest of the Caribbean coast, and the same months ask much the same of a house in Cancún. What changes inside Tulum is less the sky than the house: a house in the planned subdivisions is connected to public networks, and a house on the beach road is not, so it meets the same rain with its own plant, pumps and tanks.

When is the rainy season in Tulum, and how does it end?

It arrives in two waves rather than one: a first in May and June, with June bringing 150.5 mm on 7.6 days, and the larger one from September to November. Between them July and August ease back to about 90-100 mm a month, and the season ends gradually, with November still bringing 92.1 mm before December falls to 42.2.

The lull in July and August is a lull in volume, not in frequency. August has 9.0 days of rain, more than June; it simply brings less on each of them. For a house that matters more than the monthly total suggests, because the damage in a closed house is done less by a single downpour than by surfaces that never fully dry between one shower and the next.

The averages also hide how far a single month can stray. The station's wettest month on record was September 2013, at 902.8 mm, with 350 mm on the 17th — four fifths of an average year in thirty days, and more than a third of that in a single day. October 2005 brought 611.6 mm. Those are the months a roof, a terrace drain and a jungle lot's soakaway have to be ready for, and they arrived in the same weeks as the average peak.

The wet season does not end on a date. It thins out through November and December, and the driest months, the ones in which surfaces have the best chance of drying out between showers, are March and April. That is why exterior painting, sealing and roof work on this coast belong to the dry stretch, and why work left until the end of the rains often waits until spring.

Which months bring sargassum and storms to Tulum?

The sargassum cycle published for the coast of Quintana Roo runs from April to October, and Tulum is among the towns whose beaches the state and the Navy cover. The Atlantic hurricane season, which includes the Caribbean, runs from 1 June to 30 November, with its peak on 10 September and most of its activity between mid-August and mid-October.

Laid over the five seasons, the two calendars change the picture. The dry stretch is also when sargassum arrives; the first rains open the storm season; and the wet peak from September to November is the heart of the storm season too. Only the mild months, December to February, sit outside both calendars.

July is not exempt from storms, and Tulum has the record to show it. On 18 July 2005, Hurricane Emily made landfall on the Yucatán Peninsula near Tulum as a category 4 storm, the same day on which the station logged its wettest July day, 164.5 mm. On 5 July 2024 Beryl made landfall just northeast of Tulum as a category 1 hurricane, with the worst impacts on the coast from Tulum to Cancún.

What sargassum asks of a house on the beach and who watches it is set out in the guide to sargassum in Cancún, which covers the same coast. What an owner abroad arranges before and after a storm, and where official warnings come from, is in the guide to the hurricane season in Cancún.

What does the jungle-side humidity do to a house that is shut?

It turns every place where water lingers into a place where mould can start, because, as the EPA puts it, wet materials need to be dried within 24-48 hours to prevent mold growth, and a shut house dries nothing on its own. With rain on 86 days a year and no one opening windows, the risk is less the rain that falls than the damp that stays.

The same guidance sets the target that a closed house is measured against: indoor relative humidity below 60 percent, ideally between 30 and 50. The Tulum normal publishes no humidity figure, and none is offered here, but a house among wet trees, with little wind reaching its walls and its shutters closed for weeks, does not stay under that line without help.

The help is mostly mechanical. Air conditioning or dehumidification that is left running has to drain: the EPA lists clean drip pans and drain lines that flow among the basic measures, and a blocked condensate line is one of the quieter ways for water to stay inside a house that nobody is in. Then come the places where the jungle meets the building: leaves in gutters and on flat roofs, roots and soil against walls, timber in contact with damp ground.

A house on the beach road meets the same humidity with sea air added, and off the public networks, so the plant, pumps and tanks it relies on join the list of things that have to keep working in an empty house. A house in the planned subdivisions in town meets it with fewer trees and more pavement. All three are shut for the same months, and all three are judged by the same test: what was still wet when someone last walked through.

What is Tulum weather like in November, December and January?

Tulum weather in November is still part of the wet peak, with 92.1 mm on 7.6 days and normal highs near 30 °C; December is the drier, cooler turn, with 42.2 mm and a normal low of 19.1 °C. Tulum's January weather is the coolest of the year, at 28.8 °C by day and 18.3 °C at night, and wetter than its reputation, with 60.4 mm on 7.3 days.

That January figure surprises people who expect the winter to be dry. It is more rain than February, March or April, spread over more days, and the coldest single night in the record was 4.3 °C, on 10 February 1991. None of it is a reason to change plans; it is a reason not to assume that a house opened in January has had weeks of dry air before its owner arrives.

Tulum weather in December is, for a house, the most forgiving month of the year: the storm season is over, the sargassum cycle has closed, and the rain is the lightest since spring. It is also the month in which whatever the wet peak left behind is easiest to find, because nothing new is covering it.

When is a house in Tulum most likely to be occupied?

That depends on the owner's own year rather than on the climate, and for an owner who lives farther north it usually means a house opened from December to April and shut through the summer and autumn. On this coast those months fit the climate well: the mild months and the dry stretch are the two seasons outside the heaviest rain and outside the storm season.

The difficulty is the other side of it. The months the house is most likely to stand empty, from July to November, carry nearly 60 percent of the year's rain, the whole core of the storm season and the second half of the sargassum cycle. Whatever condition the house is in when its owner next opens the door is decided, almost entirely, in those months.

The occupied months have a use beyond living in the house. They are the dry ones, which makes them the natural time to see exterior work done rather than read about it afterwards, and the time in which the plan for the next wet season can be agreed in person.

What should be checked from abroad each season?

One fixed visit before each turn of the calendar, plus an interval for the damp that has no season: before the storm season opens on 1 June, after the wet peak in late November, and at a set frequency in between for drainage, ventilation and mould. The storm visit has a deadline; the damp visit has a rhythm.

The visit in May is drainage and storm readiness: roofs, gutters and terrace outlets cleared of leaves and run with water, condensate lines checked, shutters and fixings tested, anything loose on a terrace secured or brought in, pumps, tanks and generators serviced. It is the plain content of preventive maintenance, and it is finished by a date, not started when a storm is named.

Through July to November the visits are about water that stays: a walk through every room with the doors opened, a look behind furniture and inside wardrobes, drains and condensate lines run, and the dehumidification checked rather than assumed. After any named storm there is one more, to see the roof, the drainage and the trees nearest the house.

The visit in late November reads the season backwards, and what it finds goes into the dry stretch of March and April, when paint, plaster and sealant can be applied and left to cure. Which wall, which roof and which timber this year is a decision taken before the dry months open, as part of an annual plan.

None of this helps an owner who is far away unless it reaches them in a form they can check without asking: dated, itemized, with photographs and the spending against them. That is what the monthly owner statement is for, and for a house in Tulum the months that weigh most in it are July to November. How the rest of the work looks here, from the beach road to the town, is on the page for Tulum.