VacationSelector

New York or Rio de Janeiro?

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

Your match

New York
66
match

Wins on places to eat and nightlife with your weighting.

Rio de Janeiro
✓ Best match
69
match

Wins on value for money 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.

Scoreboard

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

New YorkRio de Janeiro
Beaches & swimming. Rio de Janeiro leads by 36 points.36
New YorkRio de Janeiro
Score64100
Swim season months312
Beaches 10 km1761
Coast distance1 km1 km
Water distance1 km1 km
Places to eat. New York leads by 41 points.41
New YorkRio de Janeiro
Score9554
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6,032804
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3816
Museums & heritage. Rio de Janeiro leads by 9 points.9
New YorkRio de Janeiro
Score6069
Museums within 10 km119110
Museums within 2 km of centre3151
Share of museums within 2 km %2646
Unesco sites within 50 km23
Nightlife. New York leads by 32 points.32
New YorkRio de Janeiro
Score8957
Drinking venues within 4 km4,159818
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre2,015509
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %4862
Nightclubs within 4 km19250
Nature & day trips. Rio de Janeiro leads by 23 points.23
New YorkRio de Janeiro
Score3962
Protected land share 50 km %421
Landscape blanket share 50 km %017
Land share of disc %6957
Park area within 2 km134 hectares113 hectares
Good for families. New York leads by 13 points.13
New YorkRio de Janeiro
Score7259
Tourist attractions within 2 km3730
Park area within 2 km134 hectares113 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km71
Sights concentration. New York leads by 18 points.18
New YorkRio de Janeiro
Score7456
Notable places within 2 km26898
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Rio de Janeiro leads by 38 points.38
New YorkRio de Janeiro
Score4381
Price level global10046.1
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Rio de Janeiro leads by 27 points.27
New YorkRio de Janeiro
Score5885
Monthly daytime high4.5 °C to 30.1 °C24 °C to 28.4 °C
Monthly rainfall74 mm to 112 mm42 mm to 232 mm
Dry months00
0255075100

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
New York
5
6
10
16
22
27
30
29
25
19
13
7
Rio de Janeiro
28
28
28
27
25
24
24
25
25
26
26
27
Sea temperature, °C
New York
6
4
5
8
13
18
22
23
21
17
13
9
Rio de Janeiro
25
25
25
25
24
23
22
21
21
22
23
24
Rainfall, mm
New York
83
74
102
97
91
103
107
112
98
97
80
104
Rio de Janeiro
208
151
173
101
71
49
45
42
69
108
220
232
Daylight, hours per day
New York
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Rio de Janeiro
13
13
12
12
11
11
11
11
12
13
13
14

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. New York: 1991-2020 normals, LaGuardia Airport (12.9 km from centre). Rio de Janeiro: 2001-2020 normals, NASA POWER reanalysis grid, no weather station within 90 km.

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromNew YorkRio de Janeiro
Buenos AiresEZE, AEP
10 h 40 m
no fares
JFK · 21 km
3 h 0 m
€212-267
GIG · 12 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
9 h 40 m
no fares
JFK · 21 km
1 h 5 m
€113-134
GIG · 12 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
1 h 20 m
€206-234
LGA · 13 km
10 h 25 m
no fares
GIG · 12 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
2 h 5 m
€165-236
EWR · 14 km
9 h 40 m
no fares
GIG · 12 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
3 h 20 m
€201-385
LGA · 13 km
10 h 35 m
no fares
GIG · 12 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
7 h 30 m
€445-517
JFK · 21 km
11 h 30 m
€957-1014
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
7 h 10 m
€459-498
JFK · 21 km
11 h 35 m
€996-1109
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
SantiagoSCL
10 h 20 m
no fares
JFK · 21 km
4 h 5 m
no fares
GIG · 12 km
MiamiMIA, OPF
2 h 45 m
€239-267
LGA · 13 km
8 h 35 m
no fares
GIG · 12 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
13 h 40 m
no fares
EWR · 14 km
14 h 40 m
€1,154-1306
GIG · 12 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 2026-09 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

MeasureNew YorkRio de Janeiro
Official languagePortuguese
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)Brazilian Real (BRL)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzCN60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5, UTC-4 in summerUTC-3
Emergency number911Police 190, ambulance 192, fire 193
Elevation25 m31 m
Main airportJohn F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK)21 km from centre188 non-stop destinationsRio de Janeiro Galeão – Tom Jobim International Airport (GIG)12 km from centre59 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureNew YorkRio de Janeiro
City population8,804,1906,211,223
People per km²7,2564,930
Museums within 10 km15770
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km23
Distinct cuisines in the centre13227
Swim season, months above 21 °C3 months12 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow New York or Rio de Janeiro 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). 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. 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.