America Just Had Its Hottest Summer on Record. Our Data Shows Where It Was Most Extreme.

Summer 2026 was the hottest on record for the contiguous United States, averaging 74.4°F — 3.0°F above the 20th-century average and 0.4°F past the previous records of 1936 and 2021. That is the verdict from NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information, in a record that stretches back 132 years. August alone was the hottest August ever measured, at 75.6°F.

But “hottest ever” nationally doesn't mean hottest everywhere. We pulled our NOAA station archive for 31 major cities and ranked each city's summer 2026 against every summer since 1970. The result reframes the headline: the record was built in the West. Albuquerque had its hottest summer on record. Las Vegas, Denver and Phoenix all landed in their top three. Meanwhile Dallas, Oklahoma City and Austin never touched their scorching 2011, and St. Louis came in a distant 25th.

NOAA's 74.4°F is a single average smeared across the entire lower 48. It broke the books for one reason above all: the West and Southwest ran at levels they had never reached. Per NOAA, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado each recorded their warmest summer on record, and Arizona tied its warmest. In August, California, Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado all logged their hottest August ever, and six Western states set records for their warmest overnight lows — the clearest fingerprint of a warming climate.

Our station data lines up exactly with that geography. The 4 cities that ranked in their own top three hottest summers are every one of them Western: Albuquerque, Las Vegas, Denver and Phoenix took the four most extreme spots outright. Widen the net to the top five and you add Boston and Philadelphia in the Northeast plus Dallas, Oklahoma City and Orlando in the South — but nobody displaces the West at the very top. The map of this record is lopsided.

Of all 31 cities we ranked, only Albuquerque set an outright all-time summer record — 81.0°F, nudging past its previous best of 80.3°F from 2011. That is the city-level echo of New Mexico's statewide record. Right behind it, the desert Southwest and interior West filled the leaderboard: Las Vegas (94.7°F, 2nd hottest), Denver (74.6°F, 2nd), Phoenix (96.9°F, 3rd), Tucson (89.2°F, 6th) and Salt Lake City (80.1°F, 7th).

Phoenix is the extreme case in raw numbers — an average summer day there ran a mean of 96.9°F, with daytime highs averaging 108.2°F across all of June, July and August. It still finished third, because Phoenix's own 2023 and 2024 summers were even more brutal. That is the through-line of this whole record: the West isn't just hot, it keeps out-hotting itself, year after year. Our hottest states and cities ranking and the cities-warming-fastest analysis show the same trend building over decades.

Here is the part almost no coverage of the “hottest summer ever” mentions: the cities Americans think of as the hottest didn't break their own records at all. Dallas ranked 5th, Oklahoma City 5th and Austin 11th — all still trailing the infamous drought summer of 2011, when Dallas averaged 91.4°F against 2026's 88.5°F. Memphis (9th) and Kansas City (14th) remain behind 1980, the year of a historic, drought-driven heat wave across the central US.

The Midwest sat even further back. St. Louis's 78.8°F was only its 25th-hottest summer of 57; New York City's 75.2°F ranked 30th. Both cities' records still belong to 2010 and 2012. So the national headline is true and misleading at once: 2026 was the hottest US summer on record, but it earned that title through the West and Southwest and through relentless, broad warmth — not by making Texas or the Ohio Valley hotter than they've ever been.

One more pattern worth noting: look at the years in that last column. Almost every city's previous record summer is recent — 2010, 2011, 2012, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024. The genuinely old records (1980, 1981, 1993) are the exceptions now, and they're the ones falling. That is what a warming baseline looks like from the ground: not one freak year, but a record book that keeps getting rewritten.