Pavement & Paw Check
Surface temperature for asphalt, concrete, artificial turf, bare soil and sand at a given air temperature and sun exposure, with guidance on what is safe for paws and bare feet.
Jump to an air temperature
Surface to check
The pavement test
7 seconds
Place your bare foot or the back of your hand on the pavement for seven seconds. If it is too hot for you, it is too hot for pets too.
Maricopa County, adapted from the Arizona Humane Society
10 seconds
Place your hand comfortably on the pavement for ten seconds. If it is too hot for your hand, it is too hot for your dog’s paws.
American Kennel Club, chief veterinary officer
5 seconds
A five-second version circulates widely online. It is not published by any veterinary body or agency we could find, and this site does not use it.
No publisher found
Asphalt, full sun · air 75 °F
125 °F
With the air at 75 °F, asphalt, full sun comes out around 125 °F, 50 °F above the air. That is hot enough to hurt a bare foot or a paw within seconds, and the pavement tests all say to keep off it.
The surface you choose in the picker
The hottest surface measured in the Phoenix set, and the one that carries the burn literature.
What one Phoenix afternoon measured
Arizona State Climate Office, Mesa: air at 105 °F at 3 p.m., four surfaces read at the same time. The dashed line is the air temperature.
ASU Arizona State Climate Office, urban heat island measurements, Mesa, Arizona. The concrete in shade reading is the one worth remembering: thirteen degrees below the concrete beside it in sun, and twelve below the air.
Burn hours, measured in Phoenix
Harrington et al., working at Maricopa Medical Center, found asphalt hot enough to cause burns from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., and hot enough to cause a second-degree burn within 35 seconds from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.. If you are walking a dog, that is the window to plan around, not the air temperature.
There is no official surface temperature, and this page says so
Air temperature has a station, a normals file and an agency behind it. Pavement has none of that. If you want to know what the asphalt outside your door is doing this afternoon, no federal product will tell you, and any site that gives you one number for it is inventing the number.
What this tool does instead is hold four named measurements side by side and let you see where they agree. They agree on the direction and the rough size of the effect (paving runs tens of degrees above the air in full sun) and they disagree on the exact figure, because they were taken on different days, on different surfaces, with different instruments. The range is roughly 30 to 55 °F of rise for asphalt in full sun. That range is the honest answer.
The four measurements behind the numbers
- ASU Arizona State Climate Office, Mesa. Air at 105 °F at 3 p.m.; asphalt 155 °F, concrete in sun 140 °F, concrete in shade 93 °F. This is the set this page leans on, because it is the only one taken in Arizona that read several surfaces at the same time. It gives asphalt a +50 °F offset, concrete +35 °F, and shade concrete below the air.
- University of Georgia Extension, 2 p.m. row. Air 95 °F; grass in shade 91 °F, grass in sun 105 °F, cement 125 °F, red brick 135 °F, blacktop 140 °F. Six surfaces in one hour, which is why it is useful even though it was not taken here: it is the only source that puts grass and paving in the same frame.
- Berens, JAMA 1970. The earliest of the set, and the reason a range is unavoidable: 125 °F of asphalt with the air at only 77 °F, a rise of 48 °F, which is steeper than anything measured since.
- Williams & Pulley, BYU, 2002. Artificial turf: 37 °F above asphalt, 86.5 °F above natural grass, 200 °F on a 98 °F day. Athletic fields, not backyards, and not Arizona: the page flags it for that reason.
Why shade beats every other fix
The most useful single number on this page is not 155 °F. It is 93 °F.
On the same afternoon, at the same site, with the same instrument, concrete in shade read twelve degrees below the air temperature while concrete in full sun read thirty-five degrees above it. That is a forty-seven-degree spread created by nothing except what was between the slab and the sun.
It is the reason the practical advice here is not complicated. If you walk a dog at three in the afternoon in July, the route matters more than the temperature: the north side of the street, the stretch under the mesquite, the shaded sidewalk near the wall. The tool cannot tell you where the shade is (that changes street by street and hour by hour) but it can tell you what the difference is worth, and it is worth more than any other adjustment available.
Why the pavement is still hot at six in the evening
Paving has a large thermal mass, so it stores the day's energy and releases it slowly. The air temperature peaks in the late afternoon and falls away; the asphalt peaks later and stays hot longer. That lag is why the burn study's window runs to 7 p.m. even though the air has been cooling since five.
It is also why the evening walk that feels pleasant to a person can still be painful to a dog. A person in shoes is a few inches above a surface they never touch. A dog's paw pads are in direct contact with it, and pads are not calloused the way the sole of a shoe is: they are skin, with a thinner layer over the same tissue.
What the tool is doing with the air temperature
Each surface carries a published offset from the air, and the tool adds that offset to whatever air temperature you set. That is a simplification with one large virtue: it uses the relationship the sources actually measured, rather than modelling the physics of solar gain, albedo and thermal mass and producing a number no study supports.
The exceptions are the surfaces measured under different skies. The UGA chart was taken with the air at 95 °F and the ASU set at 105 °F, so each carries the offset that was measured on the day it was measured, not a figure rearranged to match. The bar chart holds its scale fixed at 50 to 175 °F for the same reason the parked-car chart does: so that moving the slider slides the bars rather than rescaling the box, which makes the comparison readable.
How to use the hand test
The picker and the chart are for planning. The hand test is for the actual moment, and it beats both of them, because it measures the surface you are standing on rather than a surface someone measured somewhere else. Put the back of your hand on the paving and hold it there for the full count. If you cannot, the surface is too hot for a paw, and the acceptable answer is a different route or a different hour.
Both published versions of the test are printed in the panel with the organisation that publishes each. The five-second version that circulates online is printed there too, marked as having no publisher, because a reader has almost certainly met it and deserves to know what this site found out about it rather than having it quietly omitted.
- Arizona State University, Arizona State Climate Office: urban heat island surface temperature measurements, Mesa, Arizona: via ASU Arizona State Climate Office
The core measurements: air at 105 °F at 3 p.m. with asphalt at 155 °F, concrete in sun at 140 °F and concrete in shade at 93 °F. It is the only source that read several surfaces at once, in Arizona.
- Harrington WZ et al. "Pavement Temperature and Burns: Streets of Fire." Annals of Emergency Medicine 1995;26(5):563–568: via PubMed
The burn hours. The study was carried out at Maricopa Medical Center in Phoenix and found asphalt hot enough to burn from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., and hot enough to cause a second-degree burn within 35 seconds from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
- University of Georgia Cooperative Extension: "How Hot Does Pavement Get?": via UGA Extension pavement chart
The comparison row at the same hour: grass in shade at 91 °F, grass in sun at 105 °F, air at 95 °F, cement at 125 °F, red brick at 135 °F and blacktop at 140 °F.
- Williams CF, Pulley GE. "Synthetic Surface Heat Studies." Brigham Young University, 2002: via Williams & Pulley, BYU 2002
How artificial turf compares: 37 °F above asphalt on the same day, 86.5 °F above natural grass, a hottest reading of 200 °F on a 98 °F day, and a 35 °F rebound within five minutes of being watered.
- Berens JJ. "Thermal contact burns from streets and highways." JAMA 1970;214(11):2025–2027: via PubMed
The earliest asphalt-against-air measurements, and the reason the asphalt figure on this page is stated as a range rather than a single number.
- Maricopa County: "Protect Your Pet From the Heat", adapted from the Arizona Humane Society
The seven-second pavement test, and the local guidance that goes with it.
- American Kennel Club: veterinary guidance on hot pavement and dog paws
The ten-second variant of the same test, from the American Kennel Club’s veterinary guidance.
Every figure this tool uses was read from the source named above on 10 October 2026. Anything still waiting on a check is listed in the site's data notes rather than shown here as if it were settled.
Before you rely on this
This tool works from climate normals and published guidance, not from live weather. It describes a typical day for the month or date you chose, which is useful for planning and useless as a forecast.
- There is no official standard for surface temperature. Unlike air temperature, which has a station and a normals file, nobody publishes an authoritative asphalt figure for Phoenix. What is on this page is four named measurements, and the page says which is which rather than blending them into one number.
- Asphalt in full sun runs roughly 30 to 55 °F above the air. That is the defensible range across the studies cited, and it is wide. The single figure the tool shows is the ASU measurement of +50 °F, which is one afternoon in Mesa and not a standard.
- The shade measurements are the ones to be most careful with. Concrete in shade read 93 °F with the air at 105 °F in the ASU set (below the air). That is one reading on one afternoon, and it depends entirely on what is casting the shade and for how long.
- The artificial-turf figure is carried over from studies run outside Arizona, on athletic fields, in different conditions. The BYU work found turf 37 °F above asphalt on the same day, which would put Phoenix turf well past the top of this page’s scale. The figure shown is deliberately at the low end of the published range because the Arizona set did not measure turf at all.
- Every published figure here is for full sun unless it says shade. A surface in the shadow of a wall, a car or a mesquite is a different surface, and this tool does not model where shadows fall.
- Surface temperature is not air temperature and it does not follow the same clock. Paving keeps radiating after the air has started to cool in the evening, which is exactly why the burn study’s window runs to 7 p.m. on an afternoon that peaked hours earlier.
- This is not veterinary or medical advice. The hand test is a screening tool published by a county and a kennel club, not a diagnosis.