Hail days by metro area, 2016 to 2025

What the data shows

The top of the list. Rapid City had hail on 121 days in ten years, and hail of 1 inch or more on 102 of them. That is about ten big hail days a year. Colorado Springs had 99 hail days, and 89 of them brought big hail.

Large metros are on the list too. Denver had 49 big hail days, Dallas 47, Kansas City and St. Louis on the Missouri side 44 each, Minneapolis-St. Paul 39, Chicago 32 and Baltimore 30. Every metro in the top 50 had at least one big hail day in 2025.

Hail, wind and tornadoes do not always go together. Jackson, Mississippi had 142 days of damaging wind and 35 tornadoes, the most of both in the top 50, but 36 big hail days. Greeley, Colorado had 41 big hail days and only 12 wind days. Tulsa had 34 tornadoes, and Oklahoma City had 25.

The other end. 23 of the 434 metros in the CSV had no hail report at all in the ten years. Most of them are on the West Coast, among them Seattle, Portland and Fresno. Honolulu and Anchorage are on that list too.

What the counts cannot tell you. A hail report marks a place where someone saw hail and reported it, so places with more people may log more reports. Each metro's numbers come from one city and a 15-mile circle around it, so a storm on the far side of a large metro can miss the count. The table does not say how many roofs were damaged or how many claims were paid.

The table

This page shows the top 50 metros by big hail days. The CSV holds all 434 metros, including the ones with no hail.

Method

• Storm counts come from the NOAA NCEI Storm Events Database, full years 2016 to 2025. Our storm file was built on 2026-10-08.
• Hail, thunderstorm wind and tornado reports carry a point. A report counts when it falls within 15 miles of the city's center.
• Hail days are days with any hail report. Big hail days are days with hail 1 inch or larger, the size that dents roofs and starts insurance claims.
• Wind days are days with thunderstorm wind damage or gusts of 50 knots or more. Tornadoes counts tornadoes that began in the radius.
• Tropical counts hurricane and tropical storm episodes whose forecast zone names the city's county. Those reports have no point, so the 15-mile rule does not apply to them.
• Metros are the Census metro areas in our market data, split by state, so a metro that crosses a state line shows once for each state part. Each metro's numbers are those of the one city our market data links to it in that state (the "City key" column), not a sum: the 15-mile circles of cities in one metro overlap, so a sum would count one storm many times.
• 4 state parts of metros have no linked city in that state and are left out. 4 linked cities had no hail, wind, tornado or tropical report in the window; they show 0.
• Last big hail is the year of the latest day with hail 1 inch or larger. It is empty when there was none in the window.
• Sorted by big hail days, then hail days. This page shows the top 50; the CSV holds all 434 metros.