The short answer: far earlier in the day, and far later into the evening, than the air temperature suggests. Want a verdict for right now? Try the free pavement checker.
You are wearing shoes. Your dog is not, and the surface they walk on is not the air — it is a black solar collector that has been charging all afternoon.
On a 75°F day that feels genuinely pleasant, clear-sky asphalt peaks around 123°F. That is roughly a 50-degree gap between what the forecast tells you and what their pads touch. Concrete sidewalks run considerably cooler, but "cooler" is not the same as "safe."
| Air | Asphalt, clear | Concrete, clear | Asphalt, half cloud |
|---|---|---|---|
| 70°F | 115°F | 98°F | 99°F |
| 75°F | 123°F | 105°F | 106°F |
| 80°F | 132°F | 112°F | 114°F |
| 85°F | 141°F | 120°F | 121°F |
| 90°F | 150°F | 127°F | 129°F |
| 95°F | 159°F | 135°F | 136°F |
| 100°F | 165°F | 140°F | 142°F |
Swipe the table sideways for concrete and cloudy days →
The day's hottest pavement — around 15:00 on a mid-July day in the middle of the US, including the heat the surface stored earlier in the day (the same calculation the app runs on your real forecast). Real pavement varies with colour, age, shade and wind — these are planning numbers, not measurements of your street.
Notice where 125°F lands on the chart: a 76°F sunny afternoon (125°F). Most people would not think twice about that forecast.
Press the back of your hand flat against the pavement and hold it for seven seconds. If you have to lift it early, it is too hot for their pads.
Use the back of your hand rather than your palm; palms are calloused and will happily lie to you. Test the surface you are actually about to walk on — a shaded driveway and the sunlit road ten feet away can differ by 30 degrees.
Waiting for sunset is the standard advice, and it is only half right. Pavement has thermal mass: it keeps releasing the day's heat for hours after the sun is gone.
We checked this against 16 Arizona DOT roadside sensors at 11:13 PM local, just under four hours after sunset. The road was warmer than the air at every single station — on average +6.8°F, and up to +10.1°F.
That is the window when people are told to walk their dogs. If you plan the evening walk off the air temperature alone, you are consistently underestimating the ground by five to ten degrees — in the exact hours when you were trying to be careful.
Signs to look for: limping or refusing to walk, licking or chewing at the feet, pads that look darker than usual, missing patches of pad, or visible blisters.
This page is general information for planning walks, not veterinary advice.
The estimates are produced by the same model that runs inside PawWeather, driven by National Weather Service forecasts (api.weather.gov) plus sun angle, cloud cover and surface type.
We validate it against Arizona DOT's roadside sensor network rather than trusting the formula. Two things came out of that. In clear-sky daylight our estimate reads above what the highway sensors report — embedded sensors in a road are cooled by wind and passing traffic, and a residential sidewalk is neither, so we left the model on the cautious side of that gap. And the night check above is what made us add thermal lag: modelling evenings as "pavement equals air" was wrong by an average of 6.8°F, and it was wrong in the direction that matters.
PawWeather is free to use, has no ads and no subscription, and does the hour-by-hour version of this page for wherever you actually are.