Halloween Weather: Trick-or-Treat Odds by City

Trick-or-Treat Odds for 53 US Cities, Ranked

Ranked by the chance of a freezing night — the thing parents actually plan around. “Cold” is the share of Halloween-week nights (Oct 29–Nov 2) that dropped to 32°F or below over the last 30 years; “rain” and “snow” are the odds of measurable precipitation and snowfall on those same nights. Typical high and low, and the warmest/coldest/snowiest figures, are for Halloween itself back to 1970.

Freezing/rain/snow odds: NOAA GHCN-Daily, Oct 29–Nov 2, most recent 30 years. Warmest/coldest: exact Oct 31, 1970–2025. One representative airport station per city.

Where Snow Actually Shows Up on Halloween

Measurable snow on October 31 is a northern and mountain-West story. Anchorage leads outright — roughly one Halloween in five brings fresh snow — followed by the northern Plains and the Rockies. Denver is the tease: it sees snow in the Halloween window about 6% of years, yet in our record the snow has always landed on the 29th, 30th or 1st, never squarely on the 31st.

The most famous of them is Minneapolis's 8.2 inches on October 31, 1991 — the first act of the Halloween Blizzard of 1991. Snow kept falling into November 1 (another 18.5 inches at the airport) and the storm ultimately dropped 28.4 inches on the Twin Cities and 36.9 inches at Duluth, a Category 5 “extreme” blizzard that affected more than 23 million people across the Upper Midwest (NOAA NCEI). It remains the largest single storm in Minneapolis history — and it started with trick-or-treaters wading through ankle-deep snow.

The Soggiest Trick-or-Treating in America

If you want a ruined costume, move to the Pacific Northwest. Seattle gets measurable rain on Halloween 62% of years and Portland 59% — by late October the fall rainy season is in full swing and the odds of a dry evening are worse than a coin flip. The Great Lakes snowbelt isn't far behind: Buffalo and Cleveland both come in around 45%, a mix of cold rain and the first lake-effect flakes. At the other extreme, the desert Southwest barely notices the holiday — Phoenix (3%), Las Vegas (3%) and Tucson (5%) are as close to a guaranteed dry, mild night as the country offers.

The Warmest and Coldest Halloweens on Record

The spread in our 53-city record is enormous. Phoenix reached 96°F on Halloween 1988, the warmest anywhere, and a string of southern cities have topped 90°F — Tucson (91°F, 2008), Austin and San Antonio (90°F), and Miami, Orlando and Jacksonville (all 91°F). Go north and the numbers invert: Anchorage bottomed out at 1°F in 1985, Billings at 2°F in 1984, and Denver at 7°F in 2019. On the same calendar day, one city has recorded 96°F and another 1°F — a 95-degree gap that no other American holiday comes close to matching.

Why the North Flips to Winter First

Three things stack up by late October. Latitude is the obvious one: the farther north you go, the lower the sun sits and the faster nights lengthen, so places like Fargo and Anchorage lose daytime heating weeks ahead of the South. Elevation adds a second push — Denver, Salt Lake City and Billings sit a mile or more above sea level, and a storm that arrives as cold rain in the Midwest falls as snow in the high valleys.

The third is the difference between land and water. Interior cities cool off quickly once the sun weakens, which is why the northern Plains freeze so reliably on Halloween. Coastal and lakeside cities lag — the ocean around Seattle and the Great Lakes near Buffalo hold summer warmth into November, trading hard freezes for raw, wet evenings instead. Put it together and you get the map you see in the table: a hard-frozen interior North, a cold and soggy Northeast and Great Lakes, a mild and dry Southwest, and a Sun Belt where Halloween is still, functionally, late summer.

Halloween Weather FAQ