In the present study a general criterion for local thermal equilibrium is presented in terms of parameters of engineering importance which include the Darcy number, the effective Prandtl number of fluid, and the Reynolds number. For this, an order of magnitude analysis is performed for the case when the effect of convection heat transfer is dominant in a porous structure. The criterion proposed in this study is more general than the previous criterion suggested by Carbonell and Whitaker, because the latter is applicable only when conduction is the dominant heat transfer mode in a porous medium while the former can be applied even when convection heat transfer prevails. In order to check the validity of the proposed criterion for local thermal equilibrium, the forced convection phenomena in a porous medium with a microchanneled structure subject to an impinging jet are studied using a similarity transformation. The proposed criterion is also validated with the existing experimental and numerical results for convection heat transfer in various porous materials that include some of the parameters used in the criterion such as a microchannel heat sink with a parallel flow, a packed bed, a cellular ceramic, and a sintered metal. It is shown that the criterion presented in this work well-predicts the validity of the assumption of local thermal equilibrium in a porous medium.