The best time to visit Serengeti & Masai Mara

East African savannah straddling the border, where the two rainy seasons — not temperature — decide when to go. The serengeti and masai mara barely has a temperature season: daytime highs move only about 3 °C across the whole year, from 25 °C in May to 28 °C in October. What changes instead is rain.

Measured against a city trip, the conditions hold up May to August. June is the most consistent single month: highs near 25 °C, nights around 14 °C, and roughly 14 mm of rain across the month.

What rules months out here is rainfall and temperature, not any composite judgement. Rainfall is sharply seasonal: December averages 148 mm against 12 mm in July, so the wet season is the real planning constraint rather than heat or cold. February is the weakest month on these criteria.

January, September and November sit just outside the window, with part of the month working and part not. These are usually the interesting weeks: conditions are close to the peak-season answer while prices and crowds are not. The map lets you check them fortnight by fortnight rather than trusting a monthly average.

What the Serengeti and Masai Mara is known for

The wildebeest migration moves roughly 1.5 million animals in an annual loop through the ecosystem
The Mara river crossings, the migration's most dramatic phase, happen in the northern reaches
Ngorongoro Crater is a collapsed caldera holding dense resident game year-round
Olduvai Gorge produced some of the most important early hominin fossils ever found

Month by month

Month	High °C	Low °C	Precip mm	Wet days
January	26	15	109	14.3
February	27	15	82	10.9
March	27	16	120	13.5
April	26	16	126	15.8
May	25	15	73	9.0
June	25	14	14	3.8
July	25	14	12	2.0
August	26	14	27	3.5
September	27	15	23	4.4
October	28	16	46	6.0
November	27	16	107	12.5
December	26	15	148	15.6

Ticked rows are months where every hard requirement for a city trip is met across at least half the month.

Open Serengeti & Masai Mara on the map →

Viewed from the bridge near the Talek Gate to the Maasai Mara © Daniel Case, CC BY-SA 4.0 · cropped and resized · Wikimedia Commons

The Mara © Drouyn Cambridge, CC BY 2.0 · cropped and resized · Wikimedia Commons

Nearby regions

Figures are 30-year climatology sampled at Seronera, Ndutu, Lobo, Talek and Sekenani, averaged across those locations, from ERA5-Land reanalysis fitted with a harmonic seasonal cycle and a trend term, evaluated for 2026. Sampling named towns rather than averaging the whole region avoids blending valley and mountain conditions into a figure true of neither. Cells are about 0.08° wide, from ERA5-Land's 0.1° grid, which is itself driven by a 0.25° (~28 km) atmospheric reanalysis — so individual valleys, sheltered bays and single summits are not resolved. In steep terrain read these as conditions for the wider area rather than for one village. They describe typical conditions, not a forecast. Read how the climatology is built.