Sabah Climate 2026 — Rainfall, Temperature & Monsoon Data

Sabah’s Tropical Climate

Sabah sits close to the equator and has a tropical equatorial climate: warm all year, humid all year, and wet all year. There are no temperate seasons. What changes across the calendar is where the rain falls and how much, not how warm it is.

The two coasts run on opposite calendars, which is why single-answer advice about Sabah is usually wrong. Kota Kinabalu on the northwest coast is driest in February and wettest in October. Sandakan on the northeast coast is driest in April and May and wettest in December and January. A month that is good for one coast can be the worst of the year for the other.

For planning, the places without a station follow their nearest coast. Semporna, Lahad Datu and the Kinabatangan run on the Sandakan calendar — wettest in December and January, driest in April and May. Kudat and the Tunku Abdul Rahman islands follow Kota Kinabalu — driest in February, wettest in October.

Temperature

Coastal Sabah runs nights around 24C and days between 31 and 33C, depending on the month. April and May are marginally the warmest; January is marginally the coolest. The difference across the year is under 2C and no visitor would notice it. Temperature is not a reason to pick one month over another in Sabah. Rain is.

Altitude is a different matter, and it changes fast. Measured research stations on Mount Kinabalu give a mean daily range of 15.4 to 23.8C at Park headquarters (1,560m) and 6.7 to 13.8C at Laban Rata (3,270m). Temperature falls by about 0.55C for every 100m climbed. Kundasang, at roughly 1,900m, sits between those two — cool enough for a jacket at night. No official weather station publishes normals for any of these places. The figures above come from published research, named in the sources below.

Rainfall by Region

Sandakan, on the northeast coast, is the wettest of the three at 3,220mm. Kota Kinabalu follows at 2,718mm. Tawau, in the southeast, is much drier at 1,931mm and does not follow the northeast coast pattern at all — its wettest month reaches only 214mm.

The driest place in Sabah is not on this chart. The weather service’s annual reports repeatedly name Keningau, in the interior, as recording Malaysia’s lowest annual rainfall — 1,618mm in 2020. Keningau has no 30-year normal because its station is too new, so it cannot appear alongside the three above, but single-year observations put it below all of them.

Monsoon Patterns

• Northeast Monsoon (November-March) — brings the year’s heaviest rain to Sabah’s northeast coast. Sandakan averages 449mm in December and 444mm in January, against Kota Kinabalu’s 262mm and 141mm. Rough seas can disrupt boats and fishing on that coast. Tawau, in the southeast, is largely unaffected.
• Southwest Monsoon (late May-September) — this is the season most of Malaysia calls dry, and Sabah is the stated exception. Kota Kinabalu averages 279-288mm a month from June to September, against under 100mm in February. The weather service attributes it to the tail effects of typhoons crossing the Philippines, which feed squall lines along Borneo’s northern coast.
• Inter-monsoon (April-May, October-November) — variable, with thunderstorms most frequent. This is when Kota Kinabalu records its wettest month of all, October, at 387mm.

The practical consequence: Sabah has no dry season in the ordinary sense. Rain falls in every month at every station. What the "dry season" means on the west coast is February to April, when Kota Kinabalu drops to 78-123mm a month and rainy days fall to about seven in February. On the northeast coast the equivalent window is April and May.

Sea Temperature

Sea surface temperatures around Sabah run from 27.1C in February to 29.5C in June, on the climatology NOAA Coral Reef Watch publishes for its Sabah station. The coral bleaching threshold is 30.5C. No Malaysian body publishes a monthly sea-temperature series for Sabah, though the national water research institute runs temperature stations at Manukan and Semporna. The often-quoted "28-30C year-round" is outside the published range at both ends.

Climate Change Impacts

Sabah has warmed by 0.15C per decade since 1969. That is real, and it is also the slowest of Malaysia’s three regions — Peninsular Malaysia is warming at 0.24C per decade. The striking figure for Sabah is elsewhere: minimum temperatures are rising at 0.30C per decade, the fastest in the country. Sabah’s nights are warming considerably faster than its days.

Government projections put Sabah 0.8 to 1.0C warmer by 2030 and 1.3 to 1.4C warmer by 2050 against a 1970-2000 baseline, with annual rainfall changing between minus 4 and plus 5 per cent by 2030. Sea level around Sabah is projected to rise 0.21 to 0.62m by 2050. These projections were built on an older set of emissions scenarios; nothing more recent has been published for Sabah.

Coral bleaching is the clearest local signal. The most severe event on record for Sabah was 2024, part of the fourth global bleaching event, when regional heat stress was the highest ever recorded. Surveys in Tunku Abdul Rahman Park found 64% of colonies bleached at Sapi and 78% at Mamutik, with roughly a quarter of colonies dying at each. A well-documented earlier event hit Darvel Bay in 2020, and Layang-Layang bleached during the 1997-98 El Nino. The 2010 event that closed dive sites in Peninsular Malaysia was reported at the time as largely sparing East Malaysia, though no reliable mortality data for Sabah was collected.

On fire and haze, the record is often misattributed. The severe 2015 haze came from peat and forest fires in Indonesian Kalimantan and Sumatra, whose smoke reached Sabah’s east coast that October. Sabah itself burned only about 700 hectares in 2015. Sabah’s own fire year was 2016, during the drought that ran from December 2015 to May 2016, when the Sabah Forestry Department recorded roughly 20,000 hectares burned across Beaufort, Keningau, Sook and Tongod.

Frequently asked questions