Vancouver sits at 49.26°N, 123.11°W on the Pacific coast of British Columbia, 662,248 people across 115 km², on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, as the city's cultural institutions state on their own visitor pages. The reputation for rain arrives before the visitor does; the shape of that rain does not.
Environment and Climate Change Canada publishes the shape in its 1991–2020 climate normals. Read against the 927 bookable experiences we track, those tables answer a narrower question than "does it rain": when, how hard, how dark, and how little of what Vancouver sells has a roof.
How much rain does Vancouver actually get?
1,159.5 mm a year across 169.5 days, on the 1991–2020 normals for the Vancouver International (Airport) station at 4.3 m. A wet day records 0.2 mm or more, so those 169.5 days are roughly 46% of the calendar, and almost all of it is liquid: 1,119.2 mm falls as rain, 96.5% of the total, against 36.6 cm of snow across 7.4 days.
Divide one figure by the other and the wet day averages 6.8 mm. That is not drizzle: 76.4 days a year reach 5 mm, 40.1 days reach 10 mm and 6.7 days reach 25 mm. Nearly one wet day in four delivers ten millimetres or more — the point at which an unroofed plan stops working. Intensity peaks in winter: 174.0 mm over 20.0 January wet days is 8.7 mm on the average January wet day, against 5.5 mm in July.
Vancouver's rain is a season, not a condition
841.9 mm of Vancouver's 1,159.5 mm falls in the six months from October to March — 72.6% of the year, leaving 317.6 mm for the other six. November records 174.6 mm against July's 34.1 mm: a 5.1-fold gap between wettest and driest month on one record.
Wet days follow the same curve less steeply — 108.6 of the 169.5, or 64.1%, fall from October to March, while July and August average 12.6 wet days between them, 7.4% of the annual count. Heavy days concentrate harder: 30.2 of the 40.1 days reaching 10 mm land in those six months. In July a wet day interrupts a dry stretch; in December it is the week's default, and the plan has to assume it.
Do not average the year. A single annual rainfall figure for Vancouver describes no month that actually exists — 140.5 mm separate November from July. What to book, when, and what to pack should all be decided against the month's column. Environment and Climate Change Canada publishes every month separately, free, at climate.weather.gc.ca.
Vancouver precipitation and cloud normals, month by month
The table is the Environment and Climate Change Canada 1991–2020 record for Vancouver International (Airport), unedited. The last column counts hours in the month with the sky recorded as eight tenths covered or more.
| Month | Precipitation (mm) | Days ≥0.2 mm | Days ≥10 mm | Overcast hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | 174.0 | 20.0 | 6.2 | 553.5 |
| February | 90.8 | 15.5 | 3.0 | 459.1 |
| March | 106.4 | 17.6 | 3.5 | 505.0 |
| April | 85.5 | 15.3 | 2.6 | 437.9 |
| May | 59.1 | 12.7 | 1.9 | 407.3 |
| June | 51.1 | 11.6 | 1.6 | 408.3 |
| July | 34.1 | 6.2 | 1.2 | 276.3 |
| August | 36.1 | 6.4 | 1.2 | 260.1 |
| September | 51.9 | 8.6 | 1.4 | 274.5 |
| October | 123.9 | 15.4 | 4.5 | 446.4 |
| November | 174.6 | 19.6 | 6.4 | 511.2 |
| December | 172.2 | 20.5 | 6.6 | 556.3 |
| Year | 1,159.5 | 169.5 | 40.1 | 5,095.8 |
Darkness is the second variable: overcast hours in December
Vancouver spends 5,095.8 hours a year — 58.2% of all hours — under a sky recorded as eight tenths covered or more. That is the overcast count, and it separates the seasons more brutally than rainfall does, because it governs the hours when nothing falls.
December logs 556.3 overcast hours out of the month's 744, 74.8%; June 408.3 of 720, 56.7%; July 276.3 of 744, 37.1%. The reverse count is starker: December records 80.0 hours with the sky two tenths covered or less, 10.8% of the month, against 283.8 in July, 38.1%.
One caveat belongs with those figures: the cloud-amount thread ran from 1 January 1991 to 12 June 2013 and carries the agency's lowest completeness code, where the precipitation rows carry a stronger one. We read both tables on 20 August 2026, with the page showing a modification date of 10 August 2026.
Airport or Harbour: which Vancouver rain figure is right
There are two official ones, and they disagree. Environment and Climate Change Canada publishes 1991–2020 normals for two composite stations here: Vancouver International (Airport), climate ID 1108395, at 4.3 m, and Vancouver (Harbour), climate ID 1108446, at 2.5 m — about 12 km apart on the published coordinates, both effectively at sea level.
Harbour records 1,537.4 mm across 179.1 wet days; Airport records 1,159.5 mm across 169.5 — 32.6% more precipitation over 9.6 more wet days, with 62.6 mm of the gap in January alone.
Two official stations, twelve kilometres apart, both at sea level, differ by a third of a metre of rain a year. A Vancouver rainfall figure quoted without its station is one of two facts, chosen by accident.
Iracema Melo, on reading the Canadian Climate Normals for Vancouver
This guide uses the Airport series throughout, for two reasons: it is the only one publishing the full set this question needs — rainfall split from snowfall, day counts at every threshold, cloud amount, wind — and its precipitation normal rests on a better-covered thread, where the Harbour figure is built from 26 of the 30 years and 79% of possible observations. The Harbour number is not wrong; it is a different place, and the one thing not to do is mix them.
How many of Vancouver's 50 experiences have a roof?
One. Sorting all 927 experiences we track by where they physically happen, exactly one is indoors from arrival to finish: a 25-minute flight-simulator ride at €19.41 holding 1,340 of the destination's 50,251 reviews, 2.7%. It is also the cheapest and shortest product in the catalogue — a fair description of how much roofed time Vancouver sells.
The nearest thing to a second is a ticketed aquarium inside Stanley Park, the forested peninsula northwest of downtown, at €33.13 with 148 reviews, 0.3%. After that the catalogue runs out of interiors: no museum circuit, no gallery tour, no roofed venue visit among the fifty. Of the four walking tours we track, one works Granville Island, the sandbar-turned-market district under the Granville Street Bridge, and two work Gastown, the oldest quarter at downtown's eastern edge; their stops have roofs, the walking between them does not, at €24.85 to €105.70 for 1.75 to 3 hours.
Thirty-one per cent of Vancouver's reviews happen on the water
Water is what Vancouver sells instead of interiors. Counting whale departures, harbour and dinner cruises, the zodiac run, the ferry island days and the seaplane crossing, 15 of the 50 products happen on or over water, carrying 15,609 reviews — 31.1% of the destination total; the twelve that never leave the water hold 11,731 reviews, 23.3%, median €139.61.
On a vessel the shelter is the cabin, and the catalogue is explicit that this varies: one whale-watching product is sold as an open-air vessel in its own title, and the six whale departures run €139.69 to €163.90 for a median of 5 hours on a deck. The five harbour and dinner cruises are the short, cheap end at 1 to 2.5 hours and €47.78 to €139.53. The rest of the exposure is on foot and on wheels: eight bicycle, walking and horse-drawn products, 8,939 reviews, 17.8%, median €81.40. What is worth booking on a dry day sits in our guide to what to do in Vancouver.
What the mountain does: rain at 4.3 m, snow at 900 m
One weather system does two things at once here, and altitude is why. At the Airport station's 4.3 m, precipitation is 96.5% rain and snow lies on the ground on only 8.2 days a year. A few kilometres north, on the North Shore — the mountain wall rising behind the city across Burrard Inlet — the same storm is banked as snowpack.
The measuring network is the evidence. The Province of British Columbia lists its automated snow weather stations by elevation, and the nearest to Vancouver is Palisade Lake, station 3A09P, at 900 m (gov.bc.ca); Metro Vancouver names it as one of three alpine lakes topping up the region's drinking-water reservoirs (metrovancouver.org). The province measures snow up there because snow is what falls there; the sea-level gauge measures rain.
For a visitor that is a mechanism, not a promise: the elevation at which falling snow turns to rain shifts with each system and is forecast daily, so a wet afternoon downtown may or may not be a snowy one at the top of a gondola. Read the mountain's own conditions page before committing to the 10 North Shore mountain and suspension-bridge products we track — 9,965 reviews, 19.8%, median €141.99, the block most sensitive to what the air is doing above 900 m.
Free cancellation against Vancouver's high median
Vancouver is expensive by the standards of what we track: the catalogue median is €122, against a floor of €19.41 and a ceiling of €464.85. That makes cancellation policy a weather instrument with money attached, and 98% of the 927 experiences we track cancel free of charge.
The nine products lasting ten hours or more sit at a median of €143.35 and carry 9,997 reviews, 19.9%; they are the most exposed and the hardest to abandon halfway. Because they cancel free, the move in the wet half of the year is to reserve early against the 11 products flagged as likely to sell out, median €162.46, then shift the date once the forecast resolves.
Exactly one product of the 50 carries no free cancellation, an evening dinner cruise at €139.53 — above the median, and so the single booking here where a bad forecast costs the full amount. The long departures are covered in our guide to day trips from Vancouver.
The indoor collections, and how they name their own ground
Vancouver's strongest wet-weather buildings are ticketed institutions no booking catalogue lists, this one included, because they sell admission at their own door. Three state whose land they stand on.
The Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia opens 10:00–17:00, Thursdays to 21:00, closing Mondays from 15 October to 15 May. Admission is C$26 for adults, C$13 at ages 6–18, free for Indigenous people and half price after 17:00 on Thursdays. It states it is built on the traditional, ancestral and unceded land of the Musqueam people (moa.ubc.ca).
The Vancouver Art Gallery downtown opens 10:00–17:00 daily, Fridays to 20:00, at C$29 for British Columbia residents and C$35 otherwise, free under 19 and free on the first Friday of each month, 17:00–20:00. A seven-day summer schedule ran from 19 May to 8 September 2026; after that the standard hours apply. It acknowledges its site as within the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations (vanartgallery.bc.ca).
The Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art, at 639 Hornby Street, opens daily 10:00–17:00 at C$15 for adults and free for Indigenous peoples. It is named for Bill Reid, the Haida artist who lived from 1920 to 1998 (billreidgallery.ca). Work in all three buildings carries the name of its maker and the nation that maker belongs to; reading those labels is the difference between looking at art and looking at décor.
What Vancouver's catalogue does not sell for a wet day
Nothing among the fifty is a covered circuit between indoor sites — no gallery-to-gallery route, no museum pass, no roofed loop. Moving between roofs is left to the traveller and to public transit, the SkyTrain and the SeaBus ferry across Burrard Inlet to the North Shore, neither bookable here. Other bases across the country sit on our Canada country page.
The Vancouver wet-weather vocabulary worth knowing
Four terms carry most of what a normals table, a station listing or a booking page is telling a visitor to Vancouver.
- Climate normal
- A thirty-year average published by Environment and Climate Change Canada. The current set covers 1991–2020 and replaced the 1981–2010 set; a figure quoted without its period mixes two tables.
- Composite station
- A normals record threaded from more than one instrument at or near a site. Vancouver International (Airport) and Vancouver (Harbour) are separate composites 12 km apart, differing by 377.9 mm a year.
- Overcast hours
- Hours recorded with cloud covering eight tenths of the sky or more. The annual figure is 5,095.8; the useful pair is 556.3 in December against 276.3 in July.
- Free cancellation
- The right to cancel at no cost up to a stated deadline. 98% of the Vancouver experiences we track offer it, which is what makes a forecast worth acting on against a median of €122.
Frequently asked questions
Does it rain all the time in Vancouver?
No — it rains seasonally. Environment and Climate Change Canada's 1991–2020 normals for Vancouver International (Airport) record 1,159.5 mm across 169.5 wet days a year, but 841.9 mm of that, 72.6%, falls between October and March. July and August together account for 6.1% of the annual total.
Is Vancouver rain heavy or light?
Heavier than the reputation suggests. The annual 1,159.5 mm across 169.5 wet days averages 6.8 mm per wet day; 40.1 days a year reach 10 mm and 6.7 reach 25 mm. November is wettest at 174.6 mm and July driest at 34.1 mm, and the average January wet day delivers 8.7 mm against 5.5 mm in July.
Why do Vancouver rainfall figures differ between sources?
Because Environment and Climate Change Canada publishes two composite stations here. Vancouver (Harbour), climate ID 1108446, records 1,537.4 mm across 179.1 wet days; Vancouver International (Airport), climate ID 1108395, records 1,159.5 mm across 169.5 — 32.6% more precipitation about 12 km away. Quote any figure with its station and its 1991–2020 period.
What is there to do indoors in Vancouver when it rains?
Almost nothing in the bookable catalogue: exactly 1 of the 50 experiences we track is indoors end to end, a 25-minute flight-simulator ride at €19.41. The real indoor answers sell their own admission — the Museum of Anthropology at UBC at C$26, the Vancouver Art Gallery at C$29 for BC residents, and the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art at C$15.
When is the driest time to visit Vancouver?
July and August. On the Vancouver International (Airport) 1991–2020 normals, July averages 34.1 mm across 6.2 wet days and August 36.1 mm across 6.4 — together 6.1% of the annual total. July also records the fewest overcast hours, 276.3 of the month's 744, and the most near-clear hours, 283.8.
Does rain in Vancouver mean snow on the mountains?
Often, but the elevation at which it happens changes with each system and is forecast daily. At the airport station's 4.3 m, 96.5% of precipitation falls as rain and snow lies on the ground on 8.2 days a year. British Columbia's nearest automated snow weather station to the city, Palisade Lake (3A09P), sits at 900 m — read the mountain's own conditions page, not the city forecast.
