Every State's Hottest July on Record, Ranked

All 50 States Ranked by Hottest July Temperature

July records from the NOAA GHCN-Daily archive, pulled from our database and validated against each state's official all-time ceiling. Four raw station reads that exceeded their state record (bad data) were corrected to NOAA State Climate Extremes Committee values — see the methodology note below.

Rows highlighted: orange = record set in the 1930s Dust Bowl, red = record set 2010 or later. Data from the NOAA GHCN-D archive, queried July 16, 2026.

134°F: The Number That Anchors the List

California's July record isn't just the hottest July temperature in the country — it's the hottest temperature ever reliably recorded anywhere on the planet. On July 10, 1913, the weather station at Greenland Ranch in Death Valley (now Furnace Creek) recorded 134°F during a stretch of five straight days at or above 129°F. The World Meteorological Organization still recognizes it as the world air-temperature record.

That reading has its skeptics — some climatologists argue the 1913 instruments overshot — but it remains the official mark, and Death Valley keeps proving it's at least in the neighborhood. In July 2023 the valley hit 128°F; this month it reached 118.9°F three days running. No other state has ever officially touched 130°F. The gap between California's 134°F and second-place Arizona (125.9°F at Tacna in 1995) is eight full degrees — the largest gap anywhere in the ranking.

The Dust Bowl Still Owns July

Scan the dates in the table and a pattern jumps out that you won't find in June: the 1930s. 17 states — from North Dakota and Nebraska to Indiana, West Virginia, and New Jersey — still hold their hottest-July record from that single decade, most of them from the brutal July 1936 heat wave. Not one of those records has been broken in the 90 years since.

The reason is soil moisture. The Dust Bowl was a multi-year drought that stripped the Plains and Midwest of vegetation and dried the ground to dust. When the sun heats bare, dry soil, nearly all of that energy goes into raising air temperature instead of evaporating water — there's no evaporative cooling to blunt the peak. Layer a strong high-pressure ridge on top, as happened in July 1936, and you get the most extreme continental heat in the American record. Steele, North Dakota hit 121°F. Collegeville, Indiana reached 116°F. These weren't desert stations — they were farm towns.

July vs. June: A Tale of Two Record Books

Putting our June rankings next to July's is one of the clearest illustrations of how differently the two months behave. In June, only Rhode Island's record predates 1980, and 21 states set their June record in the single 2012 heat wave. In July, 27 of 50 records predate 1960 and the 2020s have not yet added a single one.

The takeaway isn't that one month is hotter — July wins almost everywhere on averages. It's that June's extremes are set by the modern climate and July's by a historic drought. If a future summer ever pairs Dust Bowl-scale drought with today's warmer baseline, that's when the 1936 records would finally be in danger.

When July Records Were Set: The Decade Breakdown

Every decade a state set its current hottest-July record. The 1930s tower over everything else — and the 1940s, 1960s, 1970s, and (so far) 2020s produced none at all.

The desert Southwest is the exception to the 1930s story: Arizona (1995), Nevada (1995), and New Mexico (1994) set their July records in the 1990s, and California's stands from 1913. In dry-air desert climates, the Dust Bowl offered no advantage — those places are always parched, so their peaks track modern heat instead.

How July Is Warming: City-Level Trends

Single-day records are set by rare events. Averages tell the warming story. Here are average July daily highs at major airport stations, 1970s vs. 2020s, computed from our NOAA archive this month.

Atlanta's 4.2°F jump is the standout — July days that averaged 87.0°F in the 1970s now average 91.1°F. Portland (+3.8°F) and Seattle (+3.1°F) show why the Pacific Northwest, long considered heat-safe, is now the region setting modern records. Even in Phoenix, where afternoons were already brutal, average July highs have climbed 3°F to 109.2°F. For more on which metros are heating fastest, see our analysis of summer warming since 1990.

July 2026 So Far: 1,311 Records in 15 Days

None of the state records above are in immediate danger this month — but July 2026 has still been relentless. Between July 1 and 15, 1,311 daily temperature records fell across US weather stations in our database: 1,165 daily heat records and 146 cold records. The hottest reading in the country belonged, as usual, to Death Valley, which hit 118.9°F on July 9, 10, and 11.

The standout event was a heat dome over the northern Rockies and Plains in mid-July. Ingomar, Montana reached 116°F on July 13 and Miles City hit 114.9°F on July 12 — beating a mark that had stood since 2002. Montana, not the desert Southwest, drove the record count. We broke down that event in detail in our Western heat wave analysis. It's a reminder that the July record book gets rewritten at the margins every summer, even when the 1936 peaks stay untouched.

What the Data Reveals That Other Lists Miss

Frequently Asked Questions

Data Sources & Methodology

July monthly temperature records were queried from our Neon database, built on the NOAA GHCN-Daily archive (139M observations). Each state's July record was validated against its all-time all-month ceiling; four rows that exceeded their state's official record (Utah, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Hawaii) were flagged as bad station data and replaced with NOAA State Climate Extremes Committee values. City decade averages were computed from the same archive. The July 2026 record counts come from our daily records-broken pipeline; Death Valley's 118.9°F is from station USC00042319. The 1913 world record is recognized by the WMO. Queries run July 16, 2026.

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