VacationSelector

Mexico City or Cancun?

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

Your match

Mexico City
✓ Best match
62
match

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

Cancun
50
match

Wins on 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 Cancun if the trip is built around swimming: 23 beaches nearby and sea warm enough to swim in every month of the year, with the warmth on land steady too.

Choose Mexico City if you want museums, an evening scene and a centre you can cover on foot, with 6 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach.

Scoreboard

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

Mexico CityCancun
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 97 points.97
Mexico CityCancun
Score097
Swim season months012
Beaches 10 km423
Coast distance247 km3 km
Water distance—3 km
Places to eat. Mexico City leads by 12 points.12
Mexico CityCancun
Score6654
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,179681
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1518
Museums & heritage. Mexico City leads by 59 points.59
Mexico CityCancun
Score7920
Museums within 10 km1381
Museums within 2 km of centre651
Share of museums within 2 km %47100
Unesco sites within 50 km60
Nightlife. Mexico City leads by 42 points.42
Mexico CityCancun
Score7836
Drinking venues within 4 km2,156270
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre926175
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %4365
Nightclubs within 4 km19833
Nature & day trips. Mexico City leads by 9 points.9
Mexico CityCancun
Score6354
Protected land share 50 km %309
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %10045
Park area within 2 km32 hectares66 hectares
Good for families. Mexico City leads by 18 points.18
Mexico CityCancun
Score5032
Tourist attractions within 2 km232
Park area within 2 km32 hectares66 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km43
Sights concentration. Mexico City leads by 50 points.50
Mexico CityCancun
Score544
Notable places within 2 km885
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Mexico City and Cancun are level on 76.
Mexico CityCancun
Score7676
Price level global54.254.2
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Mexico City leads by 9 points.9
Mexico CityCancun
Score9081
Monthly daytime high22.2 °C to 27.9 °C26.2 °C to 30.3 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 186 mm38 mm to 224 mm
Dry months61
0255075100

Where they differ

Cancun is the swimming trip: 23 beaches nearby against Mexico City's 4, and sea at 21°C or more in all 12 months where Mexico City has none. Its few museums at least sit tightly around the centre.

Mexico City has many times as many museums, and 6 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach where Cancun has none. It also holds many times as many notable places within walking distance of the centre, and many more bars and clubs, so days and evenings run on foot rather than by transfer.

Where they are alike

Nature and day trips work in both: protected land sits around each, and both have green space in town, Cancun with about twice as much park space near the centre. Either city rewards a day spent outside it.

Neither has a cold season, with highs staying at 22°C or above all year. Both feed you well too: Mexico City with far more restaurants near the centre, Cancun with a somewhat wider range of kitchens.

Which traveller are you?

If the point is the water, Cancun: 23 beaches nearby and a sea you can swim in in any month, with daytime highs of 26-30°C that never really drop away.

For museums and long walking days, Mexico City: many times as many museums, 6 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach, and enough notable places near the centre to fill days without transfers.

Families split the difference. Mexico City has far more attractions near the centre and 4 theme parks against Cancun's 3; Cancun answers with about twice as much park space near the centre and easy swimming.

What the numbers don't tell you

The value figure here is a national price level, identical for both by construction, so it says nothing about how these two cities compare with each other. The dataset carries no daily budget for either, so no cost comparison between them is possible at all, in either direction.

No weather station near Cancun records sunshine hours, so that figure is missing rather than low, and its monthly picture rests on temperature, rainfall and sea temperature alone. Its strong beach standing is also an annual average: the sea is warmest, at 29°C, in September, the same stretch that brings 166-224mm of rain.

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
Mexico City
22
25
26
28
27
26
25
25
24
23
23
22
Cancun
26
27
28
29
30
30
30
30
30
29
27
27
Sea temperature, °C
Mexico City
No coastline within reach
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Rainfall, mm
Mexico City
7
3
19
27
53
127
176
186
144
79
10
9
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Daylight, hours per day
Mexico City
11
12
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Sunshine, hours per day
Mexico City
8
8
9
8
8
6
6
6
5
6
7
7
Cancun
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Mexico City: 1991-2020 normals, Mexico Central, D. F. (7.9 km from centre). Cancun: 2001-2020 normals, NASA POWER reanalysis grid, no weather station within 90 km.

WorseBetter

Cancun is at its best from January to April, with highs of 26-29°C, sea holding 26-27°C and the driest spell of its year. Rain builds through late summer and peaks at 224mm in October, which is the stretch to avoid.

Mexico City's window is February to April, dry at 3-27mm with highs reaching 28°C. Its rain comes later and harder, 186mm in August, so its summer is the weaker half of the year.

Getting there

Flying fromMexico CityCancun
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
4 h 30 m
€367-420
1 stop
MEX · 7 km
3 h 45 m
€321-392
CUN · 14 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
3 h 50 m
€259-271
MEX · 7 km
3 h 25 m
€313-363
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
4 h 40 m
€335-379
MEX · 7 km
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
3 h 35 m
€248-282
1 stop
MEX · 7 km
4 h 40 m
€319-382
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
BogotaBOG
4 h 25 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
3 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
2 h 25 m
€203-306
1 stop
MEX · 7 km
2 h 35 m
€292-400
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
HoustonIAH, HOU
2 h 5 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
2 h 10 m
€286-331
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
San Jose Del CaboSJD
2 h 5 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
3 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
MiamiMIA, OPF
3 h 5 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
1 h 40 m
€327-383
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
MadridMAD
11 h 20 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
10 h 0 m
€721-977
CUN · 14 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

MeasureMexico CityCancun
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec MayaSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec Maya
CurrencyMexican Peso (MXN)Mexican Peso (MXN)
SocketsAB127 V, 60 HzAB127 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-6UTC-5
Emergency number911911
Elevation2,240 m5 m
Main airportMexico City Benito Juárez International Airport (MEX)7 km from centre95 non-stop destinationsCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days9 days

By the numbers

MeasureMexico CityCancun
City population9,209,944888,797
People per km²6,202–
Museums within 10 km1081
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km60
Distinct cuisines in the centre5031
Swim season, months above 21 °C–12 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Mexico City or Cancun 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. Airport data from OurAirports (public domain). Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. 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. Temperature and rainfall for destinations with no weather station are from the NASA POWER 2001-2020 climatology, derived from MERRA-2. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. 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 2026-09-01. Typical prices can be up to 7 days old. Daily budgets are estimates from country price levels.