Frozen pipe risk by city: 154 cities ranked for winter 2026-27

Key findings

• Duluth, Minnesota ranks first. It averages 182 nights a year at or below 32°F, its normal January low is 2°F, and 63% of its homes were built before 1960.
• The top 10: Duluth, MN; Flint, MI; Albany, NY; Portland, ME; Rochester, NY; Buffalo, NY; Syracuse, NY; Detroit, MI; Minneapolis, MN; Hartford, CT.
• The Great Lakes and the Northeast dominate. The states with the most cities in the top 25 are Michigan (4), New York (4), Ohio (4), Pennsylvania (3).
• Buffalo has the oldest housing in the study: 79% of its homes were built before 1960, and it ranks No. 6.
• Among the 20 largest cities in the study, the highest risk scores belong to Detroit (No. 8), Chicago (No. 27), and Denver (No. 37). New York City ranks No. 48, with 81 freezing nights a year at Central Park and 59% of homes built before 1960.
• Warm cities are not off the hook. Freezing nights are rare across the South, but State Farm named Texas and Tennessee among its top five states for freeze damage claim costs from January 2024 through June 2025, alongside Illinois, Oregon and Washington.

The rankings: all 154 cities

Download the data (CSV, 154 rows)

Nights at 32°F or below: NOAA's mean number of days a year with a low of 32°F or less at the city's main weather station, over the station's full record through 2023. These long-term averages run higher for most cities than NOAA's 1991 to 2020 normals, which some of our city pages quote (for example, 81 against 67 nights in New York and 126 against 121 in Chicago). Normal January low: NOAA's 1991 to 2020 normal daily minimum for January (not published for New York's Central Park station in that table). Homes built before 1960: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2024 1-year estimates. Ties share a rank. City names link to our local plumber pages where we have one.

Why cold nights and old houses

Two things decide how often pipes freeze in a city: how often it gets cold enough, and how well the houses keep the cold away from the pipes.

• Cold. The Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety calls 20°F the "temperature alert threshold" for frozen pipes, based on University of Illinois research in which uninsulated pipes in an unheated attic began to freeze at about that outdoor temperature. A city with more nights below freezing reaches that point more often.
• Where the pipes run. The American Red Cross lists pipes in basements, crawl spaces, attics, garages, kitchen cabinets and exterior walls as the most vulnerable, along with hose bibs and sprinkler lines.
• Older homes. In the U.S. Energy Information Administration's 2020 housing survey, households described about 33% of homes built before 1960 as poorly insulated or not insulated, compared with about 9% of homes built from 2000 to 2009.

What a burst pipe costs

Thawing is the cheap part. HomeGuide's October 2025 guide puts burst pipe repair at $400 to $2,000, with a national average of $1,200; HomeAdvisor's June 2026 guide gives a $500 average and a typical $200 to $3,000. The water does the real damage: the Insurance Information Institute reports that water damage and freezing claims averaged $15,400 from 2019 to 2023, and State Farm's average payment on freeze water damage claims topped $30,000 from January 2024 through June 2025.

Full price breakdowns: burst pipe repair cost, how to unfreeze a pipe safely, water damage restoration cost and what it costs to winterize a house.

Before the first hard freeze

• Find the main water shut-off, check that it works, and make sure everyone in the house knows where it is (City of Fort Worth).
• Insulate exposed pipes in basements, crawl spaces, attics and garages; foam sleeves cost $0.50 to $2 a foot (Angi, March 2026).
• On the coldest nights, let cold water drip from faucets on exposed pipes and open the cabinet doors under kitchen and bathroom sinks (American Red Cross).
• Keep the heat at 55°F or higher if you leave home in winter (American Red Cross).
• Drain garden hoses, close the inside valve to each outdoor faucet and leave the outside faucet open (American Red Cross).

How we built the index

1. We took every U.S. city in NOAA's Comparative Climatic Data tables whose main weather station could be matched to a city of 65,000 or more people in the Census Bureau's 2024 1-year estimates. That gave 154 cities. Hawaii and Alaska were left out, except Anchorage. Where a city has more than one station, we used the city station (Central Park for New York, Reagan National for Washington).
2. For each city we took two numbers: the mean number of nights a year with a low of 32°F or less (NOAA, station record through 2023), and the share of the city's housing units built before 1960 (Census table B25034).
3. We ranked the 154 cities on each number separately and converted each rank to a percentile. The score is the geometric mean of the two percentiles (multiply them, take the square root, scale to 100), so a city has to rank high on both to score high. A score of 100 would mean a city is highest on both.
4. We checked every figure in the published table against the raw NOAA and Census files.

Why some cold cities rank lower. Cities with frequent freezes but mostly newer housing, such as Flagstaff and Anchorage, score lower than their weather alone would suggest, and mild cities with old housing, such as San Francisco, score low because they rarely freeze. The index measures the overlap of the two.

Limits. Weather stations are usually at the airport, which can run colder or warmer than neighborhoods. Housing age is a stand-in for insulation and pipe placement, not a measure of either. The index compares cities; it does not predict claims for any one house.

Cite this study

Home Repair Dispatch, Frozen Pipe Risk by City, Winter 2026-27 edition, https://homerepairdispatch.com/frozen-pipe-risk-by-city/, accessed [date].

The rankings and data are free to use with a link to this page. Please also credit NOAA and the U.S. Census Bureau for the underlying data.