Recent models of Apple Watch–the Series 8 and later, to be precise–are equipped with a temperature sensor. That might sound useful for a variety of health purposes, but in practice, there are limitations. One of which is that you can’t simply ask your Apple Watch to measure your body temperature right now. Let’s see what’s going on.
Why isn’t my Apple Watch recording my temperature?
Before we begin with our explanation we need to point out that in order for your Apple Watch (8 or later) to collect your temperature data you need to wear it while you sleep for five days so that it can collect your baseline data before it will even begin to record your temperature.
To set it up you need to enable Sleep Tracking and Sleep Focus on your Apple Watch. Read How to monitor your sleep with the Apple Watch for advice on how to set this up.
How to get an Apple Watch to show my correct temperature
If you open the Health app on your iPhone and tap Browse > Body Measurements you’ll notice that wrist temperature trends are given in terms of variance “from baseline.” In the screenshot below, for example, it’s “-0.3°C from baseline.” Very interesting, but what if you want to know the absolute temperature rather than how much higher or lower it is than a standard/average reading?
David Price / Foundry
Fortunately, that information is available, and it’s relatively easy to find—you just need to slog through a few menus. Scroll down on the Wrist Temperature screen shown above to find a section headed Options. Tap on the option labelled Show All Data, and you’ll see a long list of the dates and times when the watch measured your temperature. Tap one of these and you’ll see an absolute temperature reading: in this case, for January 11, 2025, the reading is 36.37°C (97.47°F).
David Price / Foundry
Alternatively, you can look on the Apple Watch itself. Open Settings and scroll down until you start to see an alphabetically ordered list of apps (probably starting with Activity and App Store). Find Health in this list and tap it.
Now tap Health Data > Body Measurements > Wrist Temperature. You’ll see a list of recorded temperatures, beginning with the most recent. In the screenshot below you can see that the absolute temperature the last time I took a reading was, once again, 36.37°C.
David Price / Foundry
Can I take my temperature right now on Apple Watch?
There are some more limitations that it might be worth mentioning. The Apple Watch’s temperature sensor isn’t the equivalent of a digital thermometer, something you can use to take a spot check at any moment. Instead, it takes your temperature at a time of its choosing while you’re asleep. So when we look up the data using the method above, it still isn’t possible to determine your temperature right now. Whatever information you find is likely to be at least a few hours out of date.
As we’ve seen, it’s possible to drill down into the data and find a single temperature reading. But when it comes to trends, the Apple Watch is quite particular about having a big enough sample size: you need to be wearing the Apple Watch for a few weeks in a row before those results start to appear. If you were wondering why the first screenshot in this article shows trends across the first half of 2024, when my Apple Watch has a reading from January 2025, it’s because that one-off reading isn’t enough for the Apple Watch’s satisfaction. If I try to scroll the graph to the right, it says Needs More Data.
David Price / Foundry
The Apple Watch’s wrist temperature sensor is designed to monitor long-term trends rather than single moments in time. But it’s possible that Apple may allow the watch to show instant, one-off temperature readings in the future. Fingers crossed.
Author: David Price, Editor, Macworld
David has been writing about technology for well over two decades, and got on board the Apple hype train when covering the original iPhone launch in 2007. He is an enthusiastic Apple Watch evangelist and feels that the HomePod is misunderstood.