Which US City Gets the Most Daylight in a Year? We Did the Math for 1,847 Cities

Ask people which American city gets the most daylight over a full year and you’ll hear the usual suspects: Miami, Phoenix, Honolulu — somewhere sunny, somewhere south. It seems obvious. The South has the warm weather, the beach culture, the “Sunshine State” license plates.

The data says otherwise. We ran the numbers for every one of the 1,847 US cities in our dataset — a full 365 days of sunrise and sunset times for each, more than 674,000 calculations using the same astronomical engine that powers every city page on this site. The city that spends the most hours of the year with the sun above the horizon is Fairbanks, Alaska, about 120 miles south of the Arctic Circle.

And the runners-up aren’t southern either. Here’s what we found, and why the answer makes sense once you see the two mechanisms behind it.

How We Ran the Numbers

The method is simple to describe, even if it takes a computer to do:

• The cities: all 1,847 US cities and towns in our dataset (population 25,000 and up), each with its own precise latitude and longitude — the same coordinates used on its city page.
• The calculation: for every day of 2026, we computed sunrise and sunset at each city’s coordinates and summed the durations into an annual total.
• The definition: the standard one used by almanacs and weather services — the sun counts as “up” from the moment its upper edge appears above the horizon, including the effect of atmospheric refraction. (This is the same definition behind the times on every page here; see how accurate sunrise and sunset times really are for the fine print.)

One useful baseline before the results. On an airless, perfectly spherical Earth, geometry alone would give every location on the planet exactly half the year in daylight: 4,380 hours. Long summer days and short winter days would cancel out precisely, from the equator to the poles. Keep that number in mind — every deviation from it needs a physical explanation.

The Results

Every single one of the 1,847 cities beats the 4,380-hour baseline. And the ranking runs almost perfectly by latitude — from north to south, not south to north.

The top 10

Rank	City	Latitude	Annual daylight
1	Fairbanks, AK	64.8°N	4,582 h
2	Anchorage, AK	61.2°N	4,530 h
3	Juneau, AK	58.5°N	4,510 h
4	Bellingham, WA	48.8°N	4,472 h
5	Mount Vernon, WA	48.4°N	4,472 h
6	Minot, ND	48.2°N	4,471 h
7	Kalispell, MT	48.2°N	4,471 h
8	Williston, ND	48.2°N	4,471 h
9	Marysville, WA	48.1°N	4,471 h
10	Lake Stevens, WA	48.0°N	4,470 h

After Alaska’s three big cities, the leaderboard is a tour of the northern border: the Puget Sound region, the northern Great Plains, the Montana Rockies. Seattle — a city famous for gray skies — ranks 24th out of 1,847 in astronomical daylight. (Hold that thought; we’ll come back to the difference between daylight and sunshine.)

The bottom of the table

The last 13 places all belong to Puerto Rico, the lowest-latitude part of the dataset, with Ponce (18.0°N) in last place at 4,431 hours. Just above Puerto Rico sit Hawaii’s cities — Honolulu is 17th from the bottom at 4,434 hours — and then the southern tip of Florida, with Key West at 4,436 hours.

Familiar cities, for scale

City	Latitude	Annual daylight	Rank of 1,847
Seattle, WA	47.6°N	4,470 h	24
Chicago, IL	41.8°N	4,457 h	371
New York, NY	40.7°N	4,456 h	564
Los Angeles, CA	34.1°N	4,446 h	1,236
Miami, FL	25.8°N	4,437 h	1,809
Honolulu, HI	21.3°N	4,434 h	1,831

Some pairings worth saying out loud: Chicago gets about 20 more hours of daylight per year than Miami. New York beats Los Angeles by roughly 10 hours. Every “gloomy northern city” in the country astronomically out-daylights every “sunny southern city.”

The Real Surprise: The Gap Is Tiny

Here’s the finding we didn’t expect to be quite so stark. The difference between the most-daylight city in America and the least is 150.7 hours per year — about 3.4%, or roughly six of the year’s 365 days.

Ponce spends 50.6% of the year’s 8,760 hours in daylight. Fairbanks spends 52.3%. The median city in our dataset sits at 4,451 hours — 50.8%.

That’s the whole national spread. The dramatic daylight differences you feel between Alaska and Florida — 19-hour June days in Anchorage, 3½-hour December days in Fairbanks — are almost entirely about distribution across the seasons, not the annual amount. High latitudes take their daylight in a huge summer surge and a deep winter deficit; the tropics take theirs in steady, nearly identical 12-hour installments. Over a full year, the totals nearly reconcile.

Nearly — but not quite. So why does the far north come out ahead at all?

Mechanism 1: The Atmosphere Is a Lens (and It Pays More at High Latitude)

When you watch a sunset, you’re being fooled. As sunlight grazes the horizon it passes through a long slant of atmosphere, which bends the rays downward — atmospheric refraction lifts the sun’s apparent position by about 34 arc-minutes right at the horizon, slightly more than the sun’s own diameter. Add the convention that “sunrise” starts at the sun’s upper edge rather than its center (another 16 arc-minutes), and the sun is counted as “up” whenever its true center is within about 0.83° below the horizon.

That’s a fixed bonus band of sky. What varies is how long the sun takes to cross it — and that depends on the angle of the sun’s path at the horizon:

• In the tropics, the sun rises and sets nearly vertically. It punches through the bonus band quickly, collecting only a few extra minutes per day. Over 2026, that’s worth about 45 extra hours in Ponce.
• At mid-latitudes, the path tilts. New York collects about 58 extra hours a year.
• In Fairbanks, the sun crosses the horizon at a very shallow angle and lingers in the bonus band — near the solstices, spectacularly so. Annual refraction bonus: about 152 hours.

This is the same geometry that makes darkness fall faster in the South — a steep solar path gets everything over with quickly, including the freebies. Refraction alone accounts for roughly 107 hours of the 151-hour Fairbanks–Ponce gap.

Mechanism 2: Northern Summer Is Simply Longer

The remaining ~44 hours come from something most people have never noticed on a calendar: the two halves of the year aren’t the same length.

Earth’s orbit is slightly elliptical, and we pass farthest from the sun (aphelion) in early July, when Earth moves slowest along its orbit. The result: in 2026, the stretch from the March equinox to the September equinox — the half-year when Northern Hemisphere days are longer than 12 hours — lasts about 187 days, while the other half lasts about 178. Northern summer, astronomically, is more than a week longer than northern winter.

For a tropical city where every day is close to 12 hours anyway, an extra week of “summer” barely moves the total — it’s worth about 7 hours a year in Ponce. But the higher your latitude, the more each summer day out-earns each winter day, so the longer summer half-year compounds: about 18 extra hours a year in New York, and about 50 in Fairbanks. (If you’ve read our piece on why the solstices and equinoxes drift around the calendar, this is that same orbital machinery showing up in the daylight ledger.)

Two independent effects, both favoring the north. Stacked together, they hand Fairbanks the national title.

Every City Has More Long Days Than Short Ones

A side effect of the same physics: in every one of the 1,847 cities, days at least 12 hours long outnumber shorter days — the count ranges from 191 days a year in Fairbanks to 200 in Puerto Rico. There is nowhere in America where short days win the year.

Part of that is the longer summer half-year. Part is refraction again: on the equinox itself, the “12-hour day” is a myth. In New York on March 20, sunrise to sunset runs 12 hours and 8 minutes — the bonus band tips the balance before spring has officially begun. The true 12-hour day happens a few days before the March equinox and a few days after the September one.

Add Twilight, and the North Runs Away With It

Everything above counts strict daylight — sun above the horizon. But the sky is usable well past sunset, through civil twilight, when the sun sits less than 6° below the horizon.

Measure dawn-to-dusk instead of sunrise-to-sunset and the gap stops being subtle:

• Ponce, PR: 4,709 hours a year of dawn-to-dusk light — 277 hours of it civil twilight.
• New York, NY: 4,816 hours — 360 of them twilight.
• Fairbanks, AK: 5,212 hours — 630 hours of civil twilight, more than twice the tropical allowance.

The same shallow solar path that stretches Fairbanks’ sunrises stretches its twilights. By the dawn-to-dusk measure, Fairbanks out-lights Ponce by over 500 hours a year — three weeks of extra sky-light, delivered mostly as those famously long subarctic evenings.

The Honest Caveats

These are astronomical figures, and we want to be precise about what they do and don’t say:

• Daylight is not sunshine. Our numbers count hours the sun is above the horizon, not hours you can see it. Cloud cover is weather, not astronomy — and it’s why Seattle can rank 24th in astronomical daylight while Phoenix and Las Vegas crush it in sunshine hours. Cloud statistics are climate data, and outside what this site computes.
• Horizons are ideal. We assume a flat, sea-level horizon. Mountains, buildings, and elevation shift real-world sunrise and sunset by minutes — here’s how much.
• Refraction is an average. The standard 34-arc-minute figure varies slightly with air temperature and pressure, so any given sunset can run a minute or two off the tables. Over a year, it averages out.
• The year matters (barely). We used 2026. Leap years and the slow drift of the orbit change annual totals by amounts too small to reorder the rankings.

What This Means for Your City

The annual daylight ledger is one of the most democratic numbers in astronomy: wherever you live in the US, you get within a few percent of half the year in daylight, plus a small bonus courtesy of the atmosphere. What differs — enormously — is the shape of the delivery schedule.

You can see your own city’s shape on its page: the full year of daylight, the solstice extremes, and the live tracker for today (find your city, or start with the national extremes board). And if you want to see the distribution difference this article is really about, put Fairbanks and Ponce side by side in the comparison tool — two cities separated by 47 degrees of latitude, six days of annual daylight, and two completely different ways of experiencing the same sun.