The Driest Cities in America
Yuma, Arizona is the driest city in America, averaging just 2.5 inches of rain a year — on only about 15 days. The driest big metro is Las Vegas, and the driest state is Nevada. We ranked them from our archive of 139 million NOAA daily records.
“Driest” can mean two things, and they don't always agree. One is total rainfall — how many inches fall in a year. The other is how often it rains at all. The genuinely arid cities score low on both, and the driest of them is Yuma, Arizona: 2.5 inches a year, on roughly 15 days, which leaves about 350 days with no measurable rain and, by some counts, more sunshine than any other place on the planet.
To rank the rest, we pulled each city's annual precipitation straight from NOAA station records and averaged it over the last ten years (2015–2024). Below: the driest big cities, the difference between “low total” and “rarely rains,” the driest states, why these places are dry in the first place, and the trend the standard listicles skip — several of them are getting drier.
The Driest Cities, Ranked
Ranked by average annual rainfall, driest first, from our 2015–2024 NOAA data. “Rain days” is the number of days a year with measurable precipitation (at least 0.01″) — often the more telling number.
| City | Avg annual rain | Rain days / yr | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yuma, AZ | 2.5" | 15 | The driest city in the country — parked under the subtropical high, it may get more sun than anywhere on Earth. |
| Las Vegas, NV | 3.5" | 25 | The driest big metro in America. The Spring Mountains wring moisture out before it ever reaches the valley. |
| Palm Springs, CA | 4.6" | 18 | Deep in the Coachella Valley rain shadow — its scant rain arrives in a handful of heavy winter bursts. |
| Phoenix, AZ | 6.0" | 33 | Sonoran Desert heat, with roughly half its rain squeezed into the summer monsoon. |
| Bakersfield, CA | 6.3" | 37 | The south end of the San Joaquin Valley, blocked from Pacific storms by the Coast Ranges. |
| Albuquerque, NM | 7.7" | 54 | High desert at 5,300 ft — dry air, big sky, and a short but real summer monsoon. |
| El Paso, TX | 8.4" | 45 | The Chihuahuan Desert on the Rio Grande; among the sunniest cities in Texas. |
| Grand Junction, CO | 8.5" | 69 | A classic rain-shadow desert on the Western Slope, walled off by the Rockies. |
| Reno, NV | 8.9" | 54 | Sits in the lee of the Sierra Nevada, which steals the Pacific moisture first. |
| San Diego, CA | 9.8" | 42 | A dry Mediterranean coast — mild and pleasant, but genuinely arid by rainfall. |
| Fresno, CA | 10.6" | 43 | Central San Joaquin Valley; the Coast Ranges block most of what the Pacific sends. |
| Tucson, AZ | 11.2" | 47 | Drier than it looks on paper — the monsoon delivers the bulk of its rain in six summer weeks. |
For scale: the rainiest cities in America — Pensacola, Mobile, New Orleans — clear 65–73 inches a year, more than 25 times what Yuma gets. Explore any city's full record on our Las Vegas, Phoenix and Tucson pages.
Low Total vs. Rarely Rains: They're Not the Same
This is the part most “driest cities” lists get wrong. Look at Palm Springs and Las Vegas side by side. Palm Springs actually gets more rain by total — about 4.6 inches a year to Vegas's 3.5 — yet it rains on fewer days (18 vs. 25). The reason is how the water arrives. Palm Springs can go months bone-dry, then take a couple of heavy winter storms that dump an inch each; Las Vegas sprinkles its meager total across more, smaller events.
Tucson is the opposite kind of surprise. On paper its 11.2 inches looks almost humid next to Yuma, but roughly half of it falls in a six-week burst during the summer North American monsoon. For most of the year Tucson is as dry as anywhere on this list — it just has one very wet season that pads the annual figure. If you rank by “how often is the ground actually wet,” Yuma, Las Vegas and Palm Springs are in a league of their own.
The Driest Place of All: Death Valley
No city beats Death Valley, California, which averages about 2.2 inches of rain a year (NOAA) — drier than Yuma, and in some years under half an inch for the entire twelve months. It stays that dry because it's boxed in on all sides: Pacific storms have to cross four mountain ranges to reach it, losing their moisture to each in turn. By the time air sinks into the valley floor it's been wrung out and re-heated, which is also why Death Valley holds the hottest temperature ever reliably recorded. It just doesn't have the population to count as a “city” — so Yuma keeps that crown.
The Driest States
Zoom out to whole states and one name stands alone. Nevada is the driest state in the country, averaging roughly 9.5 inches of precipitation a year statewide — about a quarter of the U.S. average of ~30 inches (NOAA). After Nevada it's a tight cluster of interior-West states, all under about 14 inches: Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming, with Montana, Colorado and Idaho close behind. Every state on the driest list sits in the same broad zone — the Great Basin and desert Southwest, in the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies.
It's the mirror image of the rainiest states, where Gulf-fed Louisiana and Mississippi clear 55 inches. Statewide precipitation figures are NOAA-derived normals; exact order shifts a little depending on the averaging period, but Nevada is always first.
What Actually Makes a City Dry
Dry cities aren't all dry for the same reason. Three mechanisms do most of the work, and the driest places usually have more than one stacked on top of each other:
- The subtropical high. A belt of permanently sinking air rings the globe near 30° latitude, and the world's great deserts sit under it. Sinking air warms and dries, so it almost never makes clouds. Yuma, Phoenix and the whole Sonoran Desert live here — the same band that produces the Sahara.
- Rain shadow. When moist Pacific air is forced up and over a mountain range, it drops its rain on the windward side and descends bone-dry on the other. That single effect explains Reno (behind the Sierra Nevada), Grand Junction and Las Vegas (behind multiple ranges), and Bakersfield and Fresno (behind the Coast Ranges).
- Distance from moisture. The interior West is simply far from any warm ocean to feed it. What little moisture reaches the Great Basin has already rained out crossing California, which is why states like Nevada and Utah stay arid across their entire span, not just in one desert corner.
The Driest Cities Are Getting Drier
Here's what the standard lists leave out. For several cities on this ranking, our recent-decade averages come in below the older NOAA normals. Las Vegas averaged about 3.5 inches over 2015–2024 against a 1991–2020 normal near 4.2 inches; Phoenix came in near 6.0 inches against a ~7.2-inch normal. That's not noise — it lines up with the well-documented Southwest “megadrought,” which scientists have called the region's driest two-decade stretch in roughly 1,200 years. The desert cities were already the driest in America. This century, they've been drier than their own long-term averages.
It's the flip side of the warming we found across U.S. cities since 1990 and in the hottest cities in America: hotter, and for the Southwest, drier too.
How We Computed This
City figures come from NOAA GHCN-Daily records in our database, using the primary long-record airport station for each city. Daily precipitation (stored in tenths of a millimeter) was summed per year and averaged across the ten years 2015–2024, then converted to inches. “Rain days” counts days with at least 0.01″ of measurable precipitation. We validated the method against published NOAA normals before ranking. Statewide averages, the 1991–2020 normals used for the drought comparison, the Death Valley figure and the national extremes are from NOAA and are cited inline.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the driest city in America?
Yuma, Arizona — about 2.5 inches of rain a year, on only ~15 days, in our 2015–2024 NOAA data. Roughly 350 days a year go by with no measurable rain, and Yuma is one of the sunniest places on Earth.
What is the driest major city in the US?
Las Vegas, Nevada — about 3.5 inches a year, rain on only ~25 days. It's the driest of the big Western metros because the Spring Mountains block most incoming moisture.
What is the driest state?
Nevada, averaging roughly 9.5 inches of precipitation a year statewide (NOAA) — about a quarter of the national average. Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming follow.
What is the driest place in the US?
Death Valley, California — about 2.2 inches a year (NOAA), even drier than Yuma, but with essentially no permanent population. Among actual cities, Yuma holds the title.
Keep Exploring
See the flip side in the rainiest cities in America, compare it with the hottest cities and the coldest cities in America, read how the Arizona monsoon breaks the desert's dry spell each summer, browse US weather records by state, or look up historical rainfall for any US city and date with our lookup tool.
Sources & Method
City averages: NOAA GHCN-Daily via our database (2015–2024). Long-term normals, statewide precipitation averages, the Death Valley figure (~2.2″/yr) and the U.S. national average are from NOAA NCEI. Statewide driest-state rankings cross-checked against NOAA-derived state precipitation normals (Nevada ~9.5″). The Southwest megadrought characterization (driest ~1,200-year stretch) follows peer-reviewed reconstructions published in Nature Climate Change (2022).