VacationSelector

Dublin or Liverpool?

Two destinations compared on nine measures of openly sourced data. Weight what matters to you and the verdict follows.

Your match

Too close to call, level with your weighting

Dublin
55
match

Wins on museums & heritage and sights concentration with your weighting.

Liverpool
55
match

Wins on nature & day trips and beaches & swimming with your weighting.

What matters to you?

Pick a travel style or drag the sliders. The match scores above update as you do.

The verdict

Choose Dublin if the trip is mostly the city itself: more restaurants near the centre, about twice as many museums, and more notable places within walking distance, so days need less planning.

Choose Liverpool if you want green space and coast in the mix: roughly twice the park space near the centre, 34 beaches nearby and 3 theme parks within reach, with slightly warmer summer highs.

Scoreboard

Each measure scored 0 to 100. Open a row for the figures behind the score.

DublinLiverpool
Beaches & swimming. Liverpool leads by 11 points.11
DublinLiverpool
Score4960
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km1134
Coast distance3 km2 km
Water distance3 km2 km
Places to eat. Dublin leads by 10 points.10
DublinLiverpool
Score7060
Restaurants within 2 km of centre920542
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3732
Museums & heritage. Dublin leads by 12 points.12
DublinLiverpool
Score5543
Museums within 10 km4723
Museums within 2 km of centre3712
Share of museums within 2 km %7952
Unesco sites within 50 km12
Nightlife. Dublin leads by 3 points.3
DublinLiverpool
Score6461
Drinking venues within 4 km1,239977
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre934651
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7567
Nightclubs within 4 km4079
Nature & day trips. Liverpool leads by 32 points.32
DublinLiverpool
Score2658
Protected land share 50 km %3—
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %6260
Park area within 2 km43 hectares81 hectares
Good for families. Liverpool leads by 4 points.4
DublinLiverpool
Score5458
Tourist attractions within 2 km4125
Park area within 2 km43 hectares81 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km13
Sights concentration. Dublin leads by 12 points.12
DublinLiverpool
Score6250
Notable places within 2 km14168
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Dublin leads by 3 points.3
DublinLiverpool
Score5754
Price level global80.284.9
Daily budget€187—
Year-round weather. Dublin and Liverpool are level on 54.
DublinLiverpool
Score5454
Monthly daytime high8.2 °C to 19.5 °C7.2 °C to 20.8 °C
Monthly rainfall52 mm to 83 mm51 mm to 95 mm
Dry months00
0255075100

Where they differ

Dublin is the more compact of the two: about twice as many notable places within walking distance of the centre, about twice as many museums, and those museums sit tightly around the centre, so a short visit works on foot without much transport.

Liverpool puts more of the trip outdoors. It has roughly twice as much park space near the centre, and 2 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach against Dublin's 1, so it rewards leaving the streets for a day.

Where they are alike

The weather is the closest match. Both are mild rather than hot, Dublin 8-20°C across the year and Liverpool 7-21°C, with similar annual sunshine and no month at 40mm of rain or less, so waterproofs travel in any season.

Nights out are comparable too: in both, the drinking and clubbing sit near the centre, Dublin with more pubs and bars, Liverpool with more clubs. Both also work with children, Dublin through attractions near the centre, Liverpool through parks.

Which traveller are you?

A traveller after museums and streets to walk: Dublin. Twice as many museums as Liverpool, packed close to the centre, and more notable places within walking distance, so a two-day visit needs no timetable.

A family with young children: Liverpool. Twice the park space near the centre, 3 theme parks within reach against Dublin's 1, and 34 beaches, with the sea 2km from the centre.

A group out for the evening: either, but for different nights. Dublin has more bars and pubs, and the wider choice of kitchens beforehand; Liverpool has about twice as many clubs, most of them central.

What the numbers don't tell you

Liverpool has no daily budget figure in this data. Dublin's works out at €187 a day, but there is nothing to set it against, so any statement that one city is cheaper would be invented. The value ratings rest on a different measure both cities do have, and are not a guide to what a day costs.

Liverpool's 34 beaches describe coast within reach, not swimming: the sea tops out at 15-17°C, cool for most people. And no month in either city drops to 40mm of rain or less, so a warm month is not a dry one.

When should you go?

The figures behind each month. Each row is shaded against that destination's own year, so the deepest cell is its best month for that measure and the palest its weakest. Shades are not comparable between the two rows.

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D
Daytime high, °C
Dublin
8
9
10
12
15
18
20
19
17
14
10
8
Liverpool
7
8
10
13
17
19
21
20
18
14
10
8
Sea temperature, °C
Dublin
9
8
8
9
11
13
15
15
15
13
12
11
Liverpool
7
6
7
9
11
14
16
17
16
14
11
9
Rainfall, mm
Dublin
62
52
52
55
58
65
62
74
61
78
83
72
Liverpool
67
62
51
61
59
63
60
73
71
95
86
84
Daylight, hours per day
Dublin
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
8
Liverpool
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Dublin
2
3
4
5
6
6
5
5
4
3
2
2
Liverpool
2
2
3
5
6
6
6
6
4
3
2
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Dublin: 1991-2020 normals, Dublin Airport (9.3 km from centre). Liverpool: 1991-2020 normals, Manchester Airport (47.4 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Dublin's window runs May to September, with highs of 15-20°C. Its autumn is the drier of the two, 78mm in October against Liverpool's 95mm, which makes a late-season city break the safer bet.

Liverpool is the better choice in July and August: highs of 20-21°C and sea at 16-17°C, its warmest water of the year. Later on it turns wetter than Dublin, above 80mm a month in the autumn, so leave the coast for summer.

Getting there

Flying fromDublinLiverpool
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 10 m
€33-43
DUB · 9 km
55 m
no fares
MAN · 48 km
MalagaAGP
2 h 50 m
no fares
DUB · 9 km
2 h 50 m
no fares
LPL · 12 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 35 m
€80-139
DUB · 9 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
LPL · 12 km
FaroFAO
2 h 50 m
no fares
DUB · 9 km
2 h 50 m
no fares
LPL · 12 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 35 m
€43-47
DUB · 9 km
1 h 25 m
no fares
LPL · 12 km
ArrecifeACE
3 h 55 m
no fares
DUB · 9 km
4 h 0 m
no fares
LPL · 12 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
6 h 50 m
€449-527
1 stop
DUB · 9 km
7 h 10 m
no fares
MAN · 48 km
MarrakechRAK
3 h 30 m
no fares
DUB · 9 km
3 h 35 m
no fares
LPL · 12 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
10 h 25 m
no fares
DUB · 9 km
10 h 10 m
no fares
MAN · 48 km
CancunCUN
9 h 30 m
no fares
DUB · 9 km
9 h 50 m
no fares
MAN · 48 km

The busiest departure cities for these two, with a place kept for each other part of the world. Busiest means arriving passengers where an official count exists, and where none does, the number of non-stop services flown: official route statistics are published by the European reporting countries and by nobody else, so a table ranked on them alone would offer a reader in New York or Tokyo ten European cities. Flying times are estimated from the distance between airports, and every row is a city flown non-stop to both. Where the typical offer connects anyway, the stops are shown. Under each figure is the airport the flight lands at and how far that is from the centre, because the nearest airport is not always the one a route is flown to. Where both columns name the same airport it is one flight, and the difference between the two is the distance printed beside it. Typical return fares for 2026-08 to 2026-10, cached market data up to 7 days old. The figure is the middle half of the offers found, so a single price means they agreed and a range means they did not; for a typical route that middle half spans about a quarter of the median, and for the least settled routes rather more than the median itself.

Before you go

MeasureDublinLiverpool
Official languageEnglish, IrishEnglish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Pound Sterling (GBP)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftLeft
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number112112 or 999
Elevation20 m70 m
Main airportDublin Airport (DUB)9 km from centre201 non-stop destinationsLiverpool John Lennon Airport (LPL)12 km from centre74 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days8 days

By the numbers

MeasureDublinLiverpool
City population592,713513,441
People per km²5,1544,592
Museums within 10 km4031
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km12
Distinct cuisines in the centre7449
Swim season, months above 21 °CNoneNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Dublin or Liverpool somewhere new.

Browse every destination we have measured

Sources

© OpenStreetMap contributors, data available under the Open Database Licence. Place counts include data from Overture Maps Foundation (CDLA Permissive 2.0), assembled from Meta, Microsoft, Foursquare and other providers. Notable-place counts from Wikidata (CC0), weighted by Wikipedia language editions. Structured data from Wikidata (CC0). Weather data by Meteostat. Meteorological data provided by NOAA, DWD and others. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. Airport data from OurAirports (public domain). Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). Non-stop route lists from the "Airlines and destinations" tables on English Wikipedia airport articles, by Wikipedia contributors, reused under CC BY-SA 4.0. Currency from the ISO 4217 register maintained by SIX, cross-checked against country data from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0). Price level from World Bank open data (PPP conversion factor for private consumption and official exchange rate), CC BY 4.0. Time zones from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0); clock offsets computed from the IANA time zone database. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. Daylight hours computed from each destination's latitude using the NOAA solar position algorithm. Typical fares from Travelpayouts (Aviasales data). Route-level air passenger statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0.

Scores follow rubric v2; snapshot generated 2026-08-31. Typical prices can be up to 7 days old. Daily budgets are estimates from country price levels.