Sunniest States, Arizona Leads (2026)

1. NASA POWER solar and clear-sky 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 satellite reading to call a place sunny, so we combine three. NASA's count of clear-sky days a year, NASA's measure of how much solar energy 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 three ranks is the score that decides the list. The number we show you is still the plain count of clear days, since that's what people picture when they hear sunny. 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 other two 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 · Shutterstock/F.