National Hail Map — where it hits, year after year
Five years of National Weather Service hail reports on one map. Step through the years or hit play, and watch the same hail corridors light up season after season — the High Plains, the Front Range, the southern Plains. Risk has a geography. This is it.
Top hail counties — United States
Updates as you pan the map. Ranked by total reported hail over the last five years. % damaging is the share that were 1.5″ or larger — a partial way to see past the fact that more people means more reports.
| County | State | Total (5‑yr) | Avg/yr | Peak month | % damaging |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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Hail in the United States — the questions people ask
Where does hail happen most in the US?
Hail is most frequent across the Great Plains. The corridor running from west Texas and the Oklahoma/Kansas panhandles north through Nebraska, eastern Colorado, and into Wyoming — often called "hail alley" — sees the most large-hail days in the country. The Front Range of Colorado and the southern Plains light up year after year on this map.
What is "hail alley"?
"Hail alley" is the informal name for the high-frequency hail region centered on northeastern Colorado, southeastern Wyoming, and western Nebraska, where some areas average seven to nine or more hail days a year. The combination of altitude, strong updrafts, and a freezing level close to the ground produces frequent, often large hail.
When is hail season?
Hail tracks the severe-thunderstorm season. Across most of the country the peak runs spring through mid-summer, generally April–July, with May and June the busiest in the central Plains. The southern Plains and Southeast can begin earlier in spring.
Is this map every hailstorm that happened?
No. It shows reported hail — National Weather Service Local Storm Reports called in by spotters, law enforcement, and the public. Reporting is denser where more people and trained spotters are, so the map carries a population bias. The persistent geographic corridors, though, are physically real and line up with radar-based hail climatologies such as NSSL's MESH analyses.
How is hail damage to crops insured?
Hail is covered by crop-hail insurance, a named-peril product that's separate from federal Multi-Peril Crop Insurance (MPCI). Because hail risk is so geographically concentrated, growers on the high-frequency corridors often carry crop-hail to cover the gap. If your ground sits in a bright zone here, that's a conversation worth having — Farmers First Agri Service writes crop-hail in WI and MN.