Community noise temporal sampling requirements in general, and in the vicinity of airports or other large noise producers in particular, are not well understood. Frequently, the purpose is to sample and estimate the true yearly Day/Night Average Sound Level (DNL) or Community Noise Equivalent Level (CNEL). This being the case, it is important to note that day-to-day samples are not independent, but, in fact, the time series formed by these day-to-day samples exhibits an autocorrelated structure. For this reason, sampling requirements are 4 to 8 times larger than are calculated by assuming purely random day-to-day data. Moreover, the data may exhibit weekly and yearly deterministic trends. As a result of those factors, the analysis herein shows that sampling requirements sufficient to achieve a precision of +2 to −3 dB of the true yearly CNEL or DNL value with a 95% confidence level can be summarized as 14 days of totally random sampling throughout the year, or 3–4 weeks of quasi-random sampling taken one week at a time, or at least 30 days of totally continuous sampling.