Month by month
Bali in June
Dry-season weather for 0.91mm of rain a day more than the driest month, and none of the peak that follows it.
June is the best trade in the Bali year. It costs 0.91mm of rain a day against August, the driest month, and it misses the larger of the two annual peaks completely.
Six of Bali's twelve months are dry-season months, so saying June is dry says nothing. What is worth knowing is the size of what you give up by choosing it over the month everybody else chooses. Averaged across thirty years that difference is under a millimetre of rain a day, and it buys an island without the northern-hemisphere school holidays on it. Days sit at 29.9°C, near the coolest of the year.
This page contains affiliate links. If you book through them we may earn a small commission, at no additional cost to you. It helps keep this guide free.
What June actually measures
June sits in the flat trough of the chart, among the months where the bar stops being the thing that decides your trip.
Rainfall
62 mm
On average. An independent check at the same point puts it at 53mm.
Dry years
24 of 30
Under 100mm. August, the best in the year, manages 29.
Wettest year
172 mm
The lowest ceiling of any month outside the July and August peak.
The monthly average has two independent sources behind it and they agree to within three per cent. The dry-year count and the wettest year come from the reanalysis alone, because the product we check against publishes a climatology rather than a year-by-year series. The 100mm line is ours: about three millimetres a day, which in the tropics reads as a dry month, and it falls between May's average and April's, which is where the seasons actually divide here. As on the other month pages there is no count of rainy days and no separate figure by region.
What June costs you, exactly
Everyone planning a Bali trip makes the same trade and almost nobody sees the price. You can have the peak month's weather and the peak month's crowd, or the shoulder month's weather and an emptier island. The question is how much weather.
Here is the number. August averages 1.16mm of rain a day and June averages 2.07mm. The difference is 0.91mm a day. That is not a difference you can perceive on a holiday; it is a rounding error wearing the costume of a decision. And what it buys is the whole of July and August's crowd, which is not a rounding error at all: it is the difference between queueing at a viewpoint and having it, and between booking six months out and six weeks out.
The one caveat worth stating is that June is not August. It came in dry in 24 of the last thirty years against August's 29, so the odds are good rather than near-certain. If your trip cannot absorb a wet week at all, the peak months are more reliable and you are paying for that reliability. For everyone else the trade runs one way.
Its bad years are the least bad
Four months sit in the dry season outside the peak: May, June, September and October. They look interchangeable on the averages, which run between 49mm and 80mm. They are not interchangeable on their worst years.
The wettest June in thirty years delivered 172mm. The other three have all been worse: May 246mm, September 196mm, October 221mm. So June has the lowest ceiling of the four, which is the statistic that matters when you are booking a single week and cannot average anything.
That is the difference between an average and a risk. An average tells you what thirty Junes did between them. A ceiling tells you what the worst one did, and a single trip is one year rather than thirty. Of the four shoulder months, June is the one where the bad draw hurts least.
The month with a claim against it is September, which came in dry in more years than June did and is the only month in the calendar that beats a peak month outright. June has the better worst case; September has the better odds. Between those two the rest of the year is not close.
Where to base yourself in June
June opens everything and closes nothing, which is rare. The west coast is behaving, so Uluwatu and the Bukit are in season; Canggu and Seminyak have the dry-season version of themselves without the July queue; and the highlands around Munduk and Kintamani have good odds on a view, which they do not have for half the year.
That makes June the month to attempt the trip you cannot attempt in the wet season: a split stay that pairs the coast with the mountains, or an island night on Nusa Penida rather than a nervous day trip. The full comparison, with what the airport transfer costs to each base, is on our where to stay in Bali page.
What June is good for
The things that need the weather to cooperate and the crowd not to. A Mount Batur sunrise has dry-season odds and a fraction of the August queue at the trailhead. The Bukit reefs are working and are not yet shoulder to shoulder; our surfing guide has the seasonal switch. And the drive north takes the time the map says, which stops being true in July.
What June does not give you is the saturated green that the wet season pays for. The rice terraces and waterfalls are past their fullest and heading for their thinnest in August. If the landscape is the point of the trip rather than the sea, January flatters it more and charges you rain for the privilege.
For how June sits against the other eleven on crowds as well as rain, see when to visit, and our weather guide for the pattern across the year.
Every month of the Bali year, with its measured rainfall and what the average hides, is on Bali month by month.
Bali in June: common questions
What is the weather like in Bali in June?+
Dry-season weather. June averages 62mm in the southern lowlands, and in 24 of the last thirty years it came in under 100mm, which is the site's threshold for calling a month dry. Daytime highs are 29.9C and nights 24.2C, near the coolest of the year. It is the month before the July and August crowds arrive, with most of their weather.
Is June a good time to visit Bali?+
It is arguably the best value in the calendar. Against August, the driest month of the year, June costs you 0.91mm of rain a day, and in exchange you miss the larger of Bali's two annual peaks entirely. Almost nothing else in the Bali year is that lopsided a trade.
Is June better than July for Bali?+
For weather, July is marginally drier. For everything else June is clearly better, because the northern-hemisphere school holidays begin in July and the island fills. If your dates can move a fortnight either side of the end of June, the earlier side buys you a noticeably emptier island for a difference in rain you will not be able to detect.
How often is June actually dry in Bali?+
In 24 of the last thirty years June delivered under 100mm. August manages 29 of thirty, which is the best in the year, and the wet-season months manage between none and three. So June is not a certainty, but it is close to one, and it is a great deal closer than the monthly average alone suggests.
How hot is Bali in June?+
About 29.9C by day and 24.2C at night, which is near the bottom of the year's very narrow range. Bali's hottest and coolest months are barely two and a half degrees apart, and June sits at the cool end alongside July and August. Nobody will notice; it is mentioned only because people assume the middle of the year is the hot part, and in Bali it is not.
Is the surf good in Bali in June?+
Yes. The southeast trades are blowing offshore on the west coast, so the Bukit reefs at Uluwatu, Padang Padang, Bingin and Balangan are working, and they are working with fewer people on them than they will have a month later. June is one of the best surf months of the year on that combination.
Are the boats to Nusa Penida reliable in June?+
Among the most reliable of the year. The fast boats from Sanur are cancelled when the sea is rough, and rough days are at their scarcest through the dry season. An island day can sit anywhere in a June trip, which is not true in the wet season.