M3.5 Earthquake near El Tuito, Mexico — 14 January 2026

Minor earthquakes in this range are felt by people close to the epicentre as a brief jolt or rattle, but they very rarely cause any damage.

A magnitude 3.5 earthquake radiates roughly 2.7 tons of TNT equivalent in seismic energy.

The USGS assigns this earthquake a significance score of 189, which is below the USGS threshold of more than 600 for its significant-earthquake list. The ranking combines magnitude with available Did You Feel It responses and PAGER alert level; it is not a direct measurement of damage.

That is about 06:17 local solar time at the epicentre, around dawn.

This event was shallower than 58% of the 1,057 earthquakes recorded in Mexico in our catalogue and stronger than 67% of them.

The epicentre was located at 20.4569, -105.3410 — 15 km north of El Tuito. The closest other recorded event was a magnitude 3.9 earthquake 86 km south-southwest of here on 10 August 2026.

The nearest other settlements in our records are Campo Acosta (86 km south-southwest), Zapotiltic (226 km east-southeast), Cuyutlán (231 km southeast) and José María Morelos (253 km southwest).

At 10 km this was a shallow earthquake. Shallow events release their energy close to the surface, so for a given magnitude they produce noticeably stronger shaking — and more damage — than deeper ones. Roughly three quarters of all earthquakes worldwide occur at shallow depths.

This catalogue does not ingest eyewitness responses, so it cannot confirm where this earthquake was felt. Based on magnitude alone, an event this size may be noticed locally, especially close to the epicentre. Its shallow focus makes stronger surface shaking more likely than for a deeper event of the same magnitude.

The USGS record does not carry a link to NOAA tsunami information. That field is not an all-clear and does not state whether a tsunami occurred. In this case, a damaging tsunami would be less likely because at M3.5 it falls below the magnitude 6.5 threshold that generally applies before a submarine earthquake displaces enough water to generate a damaging tsunami; it occurred inland rather than beneath the sea floor. For an active coastal alert, use tsunami.gov or your local warning authority.

No further earthquakes have been recorded within about 150 km of the epicentre in the seven days after this event.

6 earthquakes of magnitude 4 or above have been logged within roughly 200 km of this epicentre in our catalogue. The strongest was a magnitude 5.9 event near La Cruz de Loreto on 13 May 2025. This M3.5 event released about 3,981 times less energy than that event.

No other earthquakes have been recorded within 100 km of this epicentre in the past year, which makes this a genuinely isolated event.

This earthquake is part of the January 2026 worldwide record, and of earthquakes in Mexico during January 2026. Browse the full monthly archive to compare periods.