Snowiest States, Alaska Leads (2026)

1. NOAA 1991 to 2020 monthly climate normals · 1991-2020

How we got this. The Snow Score is The Honest Local’s own recipe. Each source ranks every place on its own from 0 to 100 and the score is the average, so a place has to do well on all of them to lead. NOAA doesn't publish one annual snowfall figure, so we add up the twelve monthly normals. That's one of our two sources. The second is how many days a year, on average, at least an inch of snow is sitting on the ground, also from the normals and also summed across the year, because a place where the snow melts by lunch isn't the same as one where it lingers till March. Each source ranks every place on its own and the average of the two ranks is the score that decides the list. The plain annual snowfall is still what we show you. A city uses the nearest station that actually reports each figure, which can be a different station for each of the two, since not every airport that reports temperature also reports snow. For a state we never hand you one city's reading and call it the state's. We take its five largest cities, weight them by population, and run every source across all five. It refreshes when NOAA reissues its climate normals, about once a decade (the current set covers 1991 to 2020). For Alaska, that means population-weighted across Anchorage, Fairbanks, Juneau city and, Wasilla and Sitka city and (2024 Census population estimates), never one city standing in for the whole state; snow normal is each city's own nearest station's 12 monthly normals summed, 1991-2020.

Rankings by The Honest Local from public data, one page per list, refreshed on each source’s own cycle. Places with no reading are left out rather than estimated. Every value on this page carries its source in the page’s structured data.

Photos Shutterstock/Greg Browning · More Than Just Parks · Shutterstock.