July's Hottest Blast Came Last: 449 Records Fell as Phoenix Hit 116.9°F

Between July 24 and 26, 2026, at least 449 daily record-high temperatures fell across the United States, overwhelmingly in the West and northern Plains, as a strengthening ridge of high pressure rebuilt over the Rockies. Phoenix hit 116.9°F on July 24 — beating its own July 24 record of 116.0°F from 2023 — and El Centro, California matched it at 116.9°F, in our NOAA records database.

July 25 was the single busiest heat day of the entire month: 266 stations set a record high in one day, narrowly edging the 263 that fell on July 3. So the hottest, most widespread blast of a hot month didn't arrive at its climatological peak in mid-July — it came right at the end. And it came within days of a record cold snap that had pushed the northern US into the 40s and 30s.

Here is the stat that reframes this heat wave. In the last week of July, the country ran the full thermal gamut. Between July 20 and 24, a Canadian air mass set more than a hundred daily record lows across the Midwest and Northeast. Then the pattern reversed, and the heat exploded across the West. Nine states — from New Mexico and Utah to North Dakota — set both a record low and a record high inside the same eight-day window.

The vivid case is Capulin, New Mexico. It dropped to 42°F on July 21 and then hit 102.9°F on July 25 — a 61-degree swing at a single station in four days, both ends of it a record. That is what a buckling jet stream does: when the trough that delivered the cold lifted out, the ridge that produced July's earlier 116°F heat dome rebuilt over the Rockies and slammed the door shut on the cool air.

The two extremes barely overlapped in space, which is why both could happen at once. The cold owned the Great Lakes and interior Northeast; the heat owned everything from the Cascades to the High Plains. By July 25 the record-high count had swamped the record-low count more than ten to one.

Sparse, high-elevation cooperative stations post the eye-popping numbers in a heat wave, the same way sheltered valleys post the coldest lows. So the table below sticks to long-record airport and first-order stations — the ones with 40-plus years of history and clean siting. These are the readings you can trust.

Two things stand out. The Desert Southwest supplied the raw heat — Phoenix at 116.9°F and Las Vegas at 114°F — but the northern Rockies supplied the shock. Rapid City, South Dakota reached 111.9°F, nearly five degrees above its 2024 record, and cities that rarely see triple digits at all — Billings, Helena, Missoula — blew past 100°F.

Montana broke 97 daily heat records in three days, more than any other state and more than a fifth of the national total. Idaho added 71, Wyoming 48. But the number isn't the whole story — it's whose records fell. Across the northern Rockies, the marks that toppled were startlingly recent.

Rapid City's old July 25 record dated to 2024. Miles City's: 2024. Great Falls: 2024. Sheridan, Wyoming: 2024. A daily temperature record is supposed to represent decades of the hottest that date has ever been. When a station beats a mark it set just two summers ago — and beats it by four or five degrees — the baseline itself is moving. It is the on-the-ground signature of the trend we track in the cities where summer has warmed most since 1990.

This surge is the closing chapter of a month that never really cooled off. July opened with two separate heat waves — an East Coast event in the first week and the mid-month Rockies-and-Plains dome that pushed Montana to 114.9°F — broke for a few cool mornings around July 22, then slammed back with this late-month blast. We are tracking the full accounting in the July 2026 heat recap.

The heat is also feeding a feedback loop on the ground. Every 100-degree afternoon bakes more moisture out of soils that are already parched, deepening the 2026 US drought and priming the fuels behind an active Western wildfire season. And it keeps 2026 firmly on the path we lay out in the running case for the hottest year on record. A single cool airmass in late July was never going to change that.

Want to see how your own town's July 25 stacked up against history? You can pull the record high and low for any US city on any date — including every day of this heat wave — with our weather-on-this-day lookup on the homepage.