Oceania · Polynesia

French Polynesia

One city in the atlas · 25 airports with scheduled flights

Plan a trip to French Polynesia Ask our visa desk

Photo: Remi Jouan · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Capital: Papeete
Currency: XPF; Pacific Franc
Local time: Tahiti TimeUTC-10:00; 2 more
Calling code: +689
Driving: On the right

Facts

French Polynesia in figures

From named datasets: GeoNames, CLDR, the World Bank and Wikidata. Each is credited at the foot of the page.

Capital: Papeete
Currency: Pacific Franc XPFToday's indicative rate: XPF 100 ≈ USD 0.94Indicative, from the day's reference rates; a bank or card will charge its own.
Languages: Official: French and TahitianSpoken: French and Tahitian
Time zones: Tahiti TimeUTC-10:00Marquesas TimeUTC-09:30Gambier TimeUTC-09:00
Calling code: +689
Driving: On the right
Plugs: Not recorded in Wikidata
Emergency numbers: 112general emergencyAs recorded in Wikidata. Check them locally on arrival; they are not the only safety information you need.
Population: 282,465 (2025, World Bank)
Area: 4,167 km²
Internet domain: .pf
Land borders: None: an island or a coastal territory with no land border recorded

When to go

Climate across French Polynesia

On these averages, Papeete has a mean high between 18°C and 32°C and under 150 mm of rain in March to November.

Mild to warm and dry
Mild to warm, humid or showery
Hot
Cool
Wet
Cold

The main cities, month by month
City	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sept	Oct	Nov	Dec
Papeete	28°	28°	28°	28°	27°	27°	26°	26°	26°	26°	27°	27°

Mostly sea in the model's grid cell: the highs shown run lower than on land.

Mean daily highs, modelled for an area about 50 km across: NASA POWER climatology, 2001–2020. A cell's swatch says what the month is like (key above).

On the map

Where French Polynesia is

The dashed box is the extent of the country's main landmass, from Natural Earth; outlying islands fall outside it. The dots are the cities with pages of their own.

Land borders

None: an island or a coastal territory with no land border recorded

Cities

Cities in French Polynesia

The one place in the atlas: capitals, cities of 300,000 people or more, the places its airports serve, and the ones we have written guides to.

PapeeteCapitalÎles du Vent26,357

Airports

Airports in French Polynesia

Airports with scheduled flights and an IATA code, from OurAirports.

Visas and entry

Entry rules depend on your passport and change often, so this page does not state them. Check the destination government's official immigration website, or ask our visa desk to check your case for you.

Ask our visa desk

Plan it

Plan a trip to French Polynesia

Tell us where in French Polynesia, when and who is travelling, and a person puts the flights, the stays and the rest into one quote.

Plan a trip to French Polynesia All countries

Sources for this page

All sources and licences

GeoNames — Place data © GeoNames (geonames.org), CC BY 4.0.
OurAirports — Airport data from OurAirports (ourairports.com), public domain.
NASA POWER (Prediction Of Worldwide Energy Resources), Climatology API v2 — These data were obtained from the NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) POWER Project funded through the NASA Earth Science/Applied Science Program.
Wikidata — Facts from Wikidata (wikidata.org), CC0.
Wikimedia Commons — Each photograph's author and licence are printed beside it.
Unicode CLDR 48.2.2 (cldr-json) — Unicode CLDR data, © Unicode, Inc., Unicode License v3.
Natural Earth v5.1.2, 1:10m admin-0 map units — Made with Natural Earth. Licence: Public domain
World Bank, World Development Indicators: Population, total (SP.POP.TOTL) — Population: World Bank, World Development Indicators (SP.POP.TOTL), CC BY 4.0.