Sunniest US Cities

The major cities in United States with the most sun year round are Phoenix, Tucson and Las Vegas. All three are sunny for 85 percent of the time between sunrise and sunset, amounting to over 3800 hours a year.

It gets even sunnier during July and August in Sacramento, California.

At Sacramento the sun shines 96% of the time and all but nine days in those two summer months have mainly clear skies. During winter though, clouds move in and Sacramento sees sun for less than half of the daylight hours.

Meanwhile on the California coast, the pattern reverses. San Diego, another of the top-ranking US cities for sunshine, gets more sun in winter than in summer.

The major cities included in the weather rankings represent the 56 metropolitan areas in the United States with over one million people in 2020. Sunshine and cloud cover information are not available from the National Climatic Data Center for San Jose and Riverside California, so they were left out of the sunniest city ratings.

% sunshine is the percentage of time between sunrise and sunset that sun reaches the earth's surface. Clear days is the number days a year when clouds cover less than one-third of the sky on average.