White Christmas Odds: Will It Snow on Christmas in Your City?

The safest bets are exactly where you would guess: Fargo (37%) and Anchorage (32%) lead the country, and the Great Lakes snowbelt piles in right behind — Cleveland and Milwaukee at 25%, Chicago at 22%, Pittsburgh at 21%. Lake-effect machinery is the reason Cleveland holds the single snowiest Christmas in our data, a 10.2-inch dump in 2002.

Then the numbers do something people do not expect. Salt Lake City (28%) and Boise (27%) — two high-desert cities in the interior West — out-snow Chicago, Minneapolis (16%), and even Denver. Elevation is the whole story: Salt Lake sits at 4,200 feet and Boise at 2,800, high enough that a Christmas storm falls as snow rather than the cold rain the same system might bring to a lower, milder Midwest.

And Denver, the Mile High City, is the counter-surprise — just 17%, well behind the Great Lakes cities. Denver's winters are famously sunny and dry between storms; downslope “chinook” winds off the Front Range routinely melt the snowpack and leave many a Christmas brown. Its last white Christmas by our measure was 2012.

In 17 of the 50 cities, snow has never once fallen on Christmas Day in our 1970–2025 record — the entire Sunbelt and West Coast, from Houston and New Orleans to Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco. The lone exception among the desert cities is Tucson, which has had exactly one white Christmas: a 2.6-inch surprise in 1987.

The big Southeast and mid-Atlantic metros hover just above zero — Atlanta, Dallas, and Richmond all around 2%, each with a memorable one-off (Atlanta's snowy Christmas 2010, Dallas's in 2012). New York City and Philadelphia sit at 6%; both last managed it in 2002, when a pre-Christmas storm left a fresh 5 inches on Central Park. For most of the eastern seaboard, a white Christmas is a roughly one-in-fifteen event, not the greeting-card default.

One date dominates the cold-record column: December 25, 1983. An Arctic outbreak that week produced the coldest Christmas on record across almost the entire eastern half of the country — Chicago fell to 13 below zero, Indianapolis and Des Moines to 15 below, Pittsburgh and Milwaukee to 12 below. Fargo's all-time Christmas low, 27 below, came in another brutal year, 1996.

The warm records tell the opposite story, and they are recent. Christmas 2015, during a powerful El Niño, was stunningly mild in the East: New York City hit 66°F, Philadelphia 68°F, Atlanta 75°F. And the West just set new marks — on Christmas 2025, Denver reached 73°F and Oklahoma City 79°F, both the warmest Christmas in their records. The gap between a 27-below and a 79-degree Christmas is the whole American climate in a single date.

A little, and regionally. Forecasters expect a strong El Niño for winter 2026–27, and El Niño winters tend to steer a more active southern storm track across the southern tier of the US while leaving the far north drier and milder. In practice that can nudge a white Christmas marginally more likely across the South and slightly less likely in the northern Plains — but city-level odds are still dominated by latitude and elevation, so Fargo will beat Miami in any ENSO phase. For the full seasonal picture, see our winter 2026–27 forecast built on El Niño analogs.