July 2026 Heat Recap: 1,500+ Records Fell as Two Heat Waves Hit Opposite Corners of the Country

The first half of July 2026 broke more than 1,500 daily temperature records across the United States — 1,404 daily heat records and 162 cold records between July 1 and 17, in our NOAA records database. What makes the month unusual isn't just the count. It's the geography: the heat came in two separate waves that hit opposite corners of the country, a week apart, and each one toppled records set in a different era.

The first wave cooked the East Coast around the Fourth of July weekend, shattering records across Virginia, the Carolinas and the Appalachians — many of them dating to the notorious July 1970 heat wave. Then, a week later, a heat dome parked over the northern Rockies and Plains and did something even more extreme: it pushed eastern Montana to 116°F, breaking a wall of records from the region's last great scorcher in 2002.

Most July heat coverage treats the month as one long slog. The records data tells a sharper story. If you plot when and where the daily records fell, they cluster into two tight windows separated by a calm spell — and the two windows barely share a single state.

Wave one (July 1–5) was an eastern event. Virginia alone broke 124 daily records; Pennsylvania added 106, North Carolina 94, New York 79. This is the heat we covered as it happened in our East Coast heat wave analysis. The striking detail buried in the data: a remarkable number of the records it broke had stood since 1970. Charlottesville, Virginia hit 107°F on July 4, erasing a 98.9°F mark set in July 1970; the same day, stations from Tennessee to North Carolina toppled half-century-old records within hours of each other.

Wave two (July 11–14) was its geographic opposite. A ridge built over the northern Rockies and Great Plains, and Wyoming (139 records in four days) and Montana (118) went off. Where the eastern wave broke 1970 records, this one broke records from 2002 — the benchmark year for extreme heat across eastern Montana. We tracked the peak of it in our western heat wave coverage. July 12 was the single most extreme day of the month, with 221 records broken nationwide.

Ask most people where July's hottest temperatures come from and they'll say Death Valley or Phoenix. This year, the single most extreme readings in our records belonged to eastern Montana — a place better known for blizzards. On July 13, a rural station near Ingomar reached 116.0°F. The day before, Miles City's airport hit 114.9°F, beating its previous July 12 record of 102.9°F by a staggering 12 degrees, and Billings climbed to 111°F.

What makes those numbers so violent is the margin, not just the raw heat. A 111°F day in Phoenix is a Tuesday. A 114.9°F day in Miles City — where the average mid-July high is closer to 90°F — is a once-in-a-generation event that blows past the old record by double digits. The record book for Montana's all-time extremes got a rare rewrite.

Buried under the heat headlines is the month's quiet inverse. While the interior baked, 162 daily cold records fell — and nearly all of them clustered on the Pacific coast and in Alaska: Oregon (35), California (29) and Alaska (28) led the list. That's not a contradiction. It's the same weather pattern seen from the other side.

When a ridge of high pressure locks over the middle of the country, the jet stream has to buckle somewhere — and in July 2026 it dug a trough down the West Coast, pulling cool marine air onshore. The result: record heat in Billings and record chill in the Bay Area in the same week. It's the kind of split we flagged in our summer 2026 outlook and traced to the developing El Niño.

Two things stand out from the first half of July. First, the heat is running hot enough to erase records that survived half a century — the 1970 marks that fell on the East Coast were themselves the product of a legendary heat wave. Second, the extremes are landing in unexpected places. Eastern Montana out-scorching the desert is the sort of anomaly that fits the broader 2026 pattern we're tracking in the race for hottest year on record, and the dry, hot interior is feeding directly into the 2026 US drought.

We'll refresh this recap with full-month totals once July closes. For the all-time context behind these numbers, see every state's hottest July on record. And you can pull the daily high for any US city on any July date — including every day of this month — with our weather-on-this-day lookup on the homepage.