Arizona Is the Sunniest of Any State, Going by Its Five Largest Cities (2026)

1. NASA POWER solar data · 2021-2025
2. NOAA 1991 to 2020 monthly climate normals

How we got this. The Sunshine Score is The Honest Local’s own recipe. Each source ranks every place on its own from 0 to 100 and the score is the average, so a place has to do well on all of them to lead. We don't trust one reading to call a place sunny, so we combine two. NASA's measure of how much sunlight reaches the ground each day, and NOAA's count of how many days a year it actually rains, turned around so fewer wet days scores higher. Each source ranks every place against every other place that has it, and the average of the two ranks is the score that decides the list. The number we show you is peak sun hours a day, the solar industry's plain measure: one peak sun hour is a kilowatt-hour of sunlight on a square meter. We used to show NASA's count of clear-sky days, but it only counts days under 10% cloud, which gave Miami three a year, so it no longer counts. A city uses its own coordinates and its own weather station. For a state we never hand you one city's reading and call it the state's. We take its five largest cities, weight them by population, and run every source across all five. When a place is missing one source we score it on the one it has and say so in its row. It refreshes once a year, when NASA and NOAA publish. For Arizona, that means population-weighted across Phoenix, Tucson, Mesa, Gilbert and Chandler (2024 Census population estimates), never one city standing in for the whole state; clear-sky days and solar are each city's own 2021-2025 NASA POWER mean, population-weighted.

Rankings by The Honest Local from public data, one page per list, refreshed on each source’s own cycle. Places with no reading are left out rather than estimated. Every value on this page carries its source in the page’s structured data.

Photos Shutterstock/UladzikKryhin.