Next high tide at Cape Hatteras, NC: 04:58 GMT-4, 0.92 m / 3.0ft

Tide times at Cape Hatteras, NC on Sunday, 26 April 2026: first low tide at 10:48pm. Sunrise 06:17am, sunset 07:44pm.

Tide curve — next 24 hours

Predictions: NOAA CO-OPS station 8654400 — heights relative to MLLW.

Harmonic prediction from the official tide authority. Very high accuracy under normal conditions; storm surge may shift actual water level. Not for navigation.

Best windows Sun 26 Apr

Suggested time slots at Cape Hatteras, NC, derived from the tide, sun, moon, and conditions data on this page. Rough guidance, not a forecast.

• Tidepooling
  Around 22:48, lowest tide today
  Tide drops to 0.08 m for about an hour either side
  Confidence: medium
  7-day tidepooling strip →
• SUP
  Around 22:48, low water
  Slack water around the low
  Confidence: low
  7-day sup strip →
• Fishing
  Around 03:37, solunar major near sunrise
  Moon transit nearest the sun's horizon — angler tradition only, no certainty
  Confidence: medium
  7-day fishing strip →
• Beach walk
  Around 22:48, beach widest
  Tide low — sand widest within an hour or two of the dip
  Confidence: medium
  7-day beach walk strip →

Spring & neap tides at Cape Hatteras, NC

Next spring tide on Wed 29 Apr (range 1.1m / 3.6ft). Last neap on Sun 26 Apr. Next neap on Thu 30 Apr.

Spring tides cluster around new and full moons (biggest swings). Neap tides land on quarter moons (smallest swings). See the spring tide and neap tide glossary entries for the why.

About tides at Cape Hatteras, NC

Cape Hatteras sits at the eastern apex of the Outer Banks, the long ribbon of sandy barrier islands that runs about 320 kilometres from the Virginia line at False Cape south past Nags Head, Rodanthe, and Avon to the working harbour at Hatteras village and on through Ocracoke and Portsmouth Island. The cape itself is the seaward bend where the islands turn from north-south to east-west and where the warm Gulf Stream and the cold Labrador Current converge offshore over the Diamond Shoals — a long shifting bar of sand and shoal water that has accumulated more than 2,000 documented shipwrecks since the seventeenth century, earning the regional name Graveyard of the Atlantic. The tide here is the open-Atlantic semidiurnal signal that the cape geometry concentrates: mean range at the USCG Hatteras gauge is about 1.0 metres, climbing past 1.4 metres on the largest spring tides and dropping near 0.5 on neaps. Two highs and two lows of comparable size about twelve and a half hours apart. Pamlico Sound on the inland side of the islands runs a much smaller wind-tide signal where the lunar phase barely registers and the wind direction over a 50-kilometre fetch dominates water-level variation by 30 to 60 centimetres on sustained events. The defining historical feature is the United States Life-Saving Service. The federal precursor to the modern Coast Guard built a chain of life-saving stations along the Outer Banks coast through the 1870s and 1880s — Pea Island, Chicamacomico, Little Kinnakeet, Big Kinnakeet, Cape Hatteras, Creeds Hill, Durants — to rescue crews from the constant shipwreck traffic over the Diamond Shoals. The Pea Island station was the first US Life-Saving Service crew composed entirely of African American surfmen and operated from 1880 through 1947. The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, the tallest brick lighthouse in North America at 64 metres, was built in 1870 and moved 880 metres inland in 1999 to escape the eroding shoreline that had crept within 36 metres of the foundation. Surf at Avon Pier, S-Turns at Rodanthe, and the cape itself at Lighthouse Beach reads the open Atlantic swell and the sand-bar geometry that reshapes after every nor'easter. The Frisco fishing pier, the Hatteras-Ocracoke ferry, the Avon Pier striped-bass autumn run, the Cape Hatteras National Seashore beach-driving permits, and the Pamlico Sound flats fishing for redfish and speckled trout all read the table for different windows. Hurricane and nor'easter season can both stack water above predicted by a metre or more — Hurricane Dorian in September 2019 cut a new inlet through Ocracoke Island that the National Park Service eventually filled. NOAA CO-OPS runs the authoritative gauge network and harmonic predictions; the National Hurricane Center is the authoritative real-time source during tropical landfall events.

Common questions about tides at Cape Hatteras, NC