We investigate the decay properties of smooth axially symmetric D-solutions to the steady Navier–Stokes equations. The achievements of this paper are two folds. One is improved decay rates of $$u_{\theta }$$ uθ and $$\nabla \mathbf{u}$$ ∇u , especially we show that $$|u_{\theta }(r,z)|\le c(\frac{\log r}{r})^{\frac{1}{2}}$$ |uθ(r,z)|≤c(logrr)12 for any smooth axially symmetric D-solutions to the Navier–Stokes equations. These improvement are based on improved weighted estimates of $$\omega _{\theta }$$ ωθ and $$A_p$$ Ap weight for singular integral operators, which yields good decay estimates for $$(\nabla u_r, \nabla u_z)$$ (∇ur,∇uz) and $$(\omega _r, \omega _{z})$$ (ωr,ωz) , where $${\varvec{\omega }}=\textit{curl }{} \mathbf{u}= \omega _r \mathbf{e}_r + \omega _{\theta } \mathbf{e}_{\theta }+ \omega _z \mathbf{e}_z$$ ω=curlu=ωrer+ωθeθ+ωzez . Another is the first decay rate estimates in the Oz-direction for smooth axially symmetric flows without swirl. We do not need any small assumptions on the forcing term.