VacationSelector

Seattle or New York?

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

Your match

Seattle
52
match

Wins on year-round weather and nature & day trips with your weighting.

New York
✓ Best match
66
match

Wins on nightlife and good for families 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 New York if the trip is about the city itself: eating out, late nights, museums and a centre where the sights sit close together, with warm water in late summer.

Choose Seattle if you want a dry, mild summer: July and August bring 25°C and almost no rain, in a smaller centre where the museums and bars sit close by.

Scoreboard

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

SeattleNew York
Beaches & swimming. New York leads by 4 points.4
SeattleNew York
Score6064
Swim season months03
Beaches 10 km10017
Coast distance1 km1 km
Water distance1 km1 km
Places to eat. New York leads by 20 points.20
SeattleNew York
Score7595
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,4606,032
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3538
Museums & heritage. New York leads by 24 points.24
SeattleNew York
Score3660
Museums within 10 km28119
Museums within 2 km of centre1731
Share of museums within 2 km %6126
Unesco sites within 50 km02
Nightlife. New York leads by 32 points.32
SeattleNew York
Score5789
Drinking venues within 4 km8734,159
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre6962,015
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8048
Nightclubs within 4 km34192
Nature & day trips. Seattle leads by 1 points.1
SeattleNew York
Score4039
Protected land share 50 km %94
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %8069
Park area within 2 km63 hectares134 hectares
Good for families. New York leads by 26 points.26
SeattleNew York
Score4672
Tourist attractions within 2 km1737
Park area within 2 km63 hectares134 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km17
Sights concentration. New York leads by 22 points.22
SeattleNew York
Score5274
Notable places within 2 km76268
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Seattle and New York are level on 43.
SeattleNew York
Score4343
Price level global100100
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Seattle leads by 3 points.3
SeattleNew York
Score6158
Monthly daytime high7.8 °C to 24.9 °C4.5 °C to 30.1 °C
Monthly rainfall15 mm to 160 mm74 mm to 112 mm
Dry months30
0255075100

Where they differ

New York has many times as many places to drink, though only about half sit near the centre. It has many times as many museums, plus 2 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach where Seattle has none. For families it carries about twice as many attractions and park space near the centre, and 7 theme parks against 1.

Seattle's advantages are outdoor and small-scale: 9% of the surrounding land is protected against 4% around New York, and its bars and museums cluster tightly around the centre.

Where they are alike

Neither city is really a base for countryside. Protected land makes up a minority of the surroundings in both cases, 9% around Seattle and 4% around New York, so day trips work as a supplement to a city stay rather than the reason to book.

Both put the sea 1km from the centre, both reach their warmest water in August, and each keeps daytime highs within a moderate band across the year rather than swinging to extremes.

Which traveller are you?

Anyone travelling to eat and go out should pick New York: many times as many restaurants and bars, with a similar range of kitchens to Seattle but far more of them, though only about half the drinking places sit near the centre.

Families are better served in New York, with about twice as many attractions and park space near the centre, and 7 theme parks within reach against Seattle's 1.

Walkers who want cool, dry days outdoors will prefer Seattle: 9% of the land around it is protected and 100 beaches lie nearby, though the sea stays near 12°C.

What the numbers don't tell you

Two things are simply not measured here. There is no daily cost figure for either city, so no comparison of price is possible; the value figure is a national price level, identical for both by construction, and tells you nothing about how one compares with the other. Sunshine is also unrecorded near both cities, so that side of the weather is unmeasured rather than poor.

Beach counts mislead in opposite directions. Seattle has 100 beaches nearby, but the sea holds near 12°C all year, so they are for walking, not swimming. New York's water passes 21°C for only 3 months, and its rain never lets up.

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
Seattle
8
10
12
15
19
21
25
25
22
15
11
8
New York
5
6
10
16
22
27
30
29
25
19
13
7
Sea temperature, °C
Seattle
8
8
8
9
10
11
12
12
11
10
9
9
New York
6
4
5
8
13
18
22
23
21
17
13
9
Rainfall, mm
Seattle
147
96
106
81
48
37
15
25
41
99
160
147
New York
83
74
102
97
91
103
107
112
98
97
80
104
Daylight, hours per day
Seattle
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
9
New York
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Seattle: 1991-2020 normals, Seattle-Tacoma Airport (17.3 km from centre). New York: 1991-2020 normals, LaGuardia Airport (12.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

New York peaks in May and June and again in September, with highs of 22-27°C and sea at 21-23°C in late summer. Rain is steady all year, near 100mm a month, so no month is dry.

Seattle's window is narrower and drier: July and August reach 25°C with only 15-25mm of rain, while winter is wet, at 147-160mm. The sea stays near 12°C all year, so swimming is not really part of the trip.

Getting there

Flying fromSeattleNew York
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
2 h 30 m
€111-203
SEA · 18 km
5 h 20 m
€314-354
1 stop
JFK · 21 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
3 h 55 m
€257-317
1 stop
SEA · 18 km
2 h 5 m
€236-237
LGA · 13 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
5 h 0 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
1 h 5 m
€203-258
LGA · 13 km
DenverDEN, APA
2 h 35 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
3 h 45 m
no fares
LGA · 13 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
3 h 50 m
€204-286
1 stop
SEA · 18 km
3 h 20 m
€201-385
LGA · 13 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
9 h 45 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
7 h 10 m
€459-498
JFK · 21 km
BostonBOS, PSM
5 h 25 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
1 h 0 m
€193-222
JFK · 21 km
TokyoHND, NRT
9 h 45 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
13 h 30 m
€989-1136
JFK · 21 km
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
5 h 5 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
4 h 40 m
€374-446
1 stop
JFK · 21 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
14 h 40 m
€1,006-1077
2 stops
SEA · 18 km
13 h 40 m
no fares
EWR · 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

MeasureSeattleNew York
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-8, UTC-7 in summerUTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency number911911
Elevation40 m25 m
Main airportSeattle–Tacoma International Airport (SEA)18 km from centre135 non-stop destinationsJohn F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK)21 km from centre188 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureSeattleNew York
City population737,0158,804,190
People per km²1,9967,256
Museums within 10 km27157
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km02
Distinct cuisines in the centre78132
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone3 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Seattle or New York 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. 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.