Evaporative cooling is a physical phenomenon in which evaporation of a liquid, typically into surrounding air, cools an object or a liquid in contact with it. Latent heat describes the amount of heat that is needed to evaporate the liquid; this heat comes from the liquid itself and the surrounding gas and surfaces. When considering water evaporating into air, the wet-bulb temperature, as compared to the air's dry-bulb temperature, is a measure of the potential for evaporative cooling. The greater the difference between the two temperatures, the greater the evaporative cooling effect. When the temperatures are the same, no net evaporation of water in air occurs, thus there is no cooling effect.

A simple example of natural evaporative cooling is perspiration, or sweat, which the body secretes in order to cool itself. The amount of heat transfer depends on the evaporation rate, which in turn depends on the humidity of the air and its temperature, which is why one's sweat accumulates more on hot, humid days: the perspiration cannot evaporate.

A recent application of evaporative cooling is the "self-refrigerating" beverage can. A separate compartment inside the can contains a desiccant and cooling liquid. Just before consumption, the desiccant comes into contact with the cooling liquid, inducing evaporation.

Evaporative cooling is a very common form of cooling buildings for thermal comfort since it is relatively cheap and requires less energy than many other forms of cooling. However, evaporative cooling requires an abundant water source as an evaporate, and is only efficient when the relative humidity is low, restricting its effective use to dry climates. Evaporative coolers are colloquially referred to as swamp coolers in the U.S. In other places they are known as desert coolers.

Evaporative cooling is commonly used in cryogenic applications. The vapor above a reservoir of cryogenic liquid is pumped away, and the liquid continuously evaporates as long as the liquid's vapor pressure is significant. Evaporative cooling of ordinary helium forms a 1-K pot, which can cool to at least 1.2 K. Evaporative cooling of helium-3 can provide temperatures below 300 mK. Each of these techniques can be used to make cryocoolers, or as components of lower-temperature cryostats such as dilution refrigerators. As the temperature decreases, the vapor pressure of the liquid also falls, and cooling becomes less effective. This sets a lower limit to the temperature attainable with a given liquid.

Evaporative cooling has recently been observed to operate on a planetary scale on Pluto, where it has sometimes been called an anti-greenhouse effect.

On Earth, trees transpire large amounts of water through pores in their leaves called stomata, and through this process of evaporative cooling, forests interact with climate at local and global scales.

Evaporative cooling is also the last cooling step in order to reach the ultra-low temperatures required for Bose–Einstein condensation (BEC). Here, so-called forced evaporative cooling is used to selectively remove high-energetic ("hot") atoms from an atom cloud until the remaining cloud is cooled below the BEC transition temperature. For a cloud of 1 million alkali atoms, this temperature is about 1μK.

It is also Evaporation that is at the heart of the typical compressor based Air Conditioner; only that once its refrigerant evaporates inside the "evaporator" coils, the refrigerant gas is recycled to the compressor and condensor; instead of a "swamp cooler's" water, where it only evaporates once and then is discarded, typically vented to the outdoors.