Which Cheery City in Idaho Gets the Most Sunshine in the State?

Raise your hand if you or someone you know moved to Boise without doing research on the city’s climate. If your hand is up, you already know that Boise’s beautiful but hot summers are one of those things that shock people the first year they live here. 

And we’re not just talking about how many triple-digit days a year Boise experiences or the “dry heat.” We’re also talking about how sunny Boise is and how late the sun goes down in the summer. Sunsets in June typically start at 9:30 p.m., but it’s not pitch black until much later than that. 

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While we’ve lived in Boise for well over a decade, this mystified us after living in a part of the Midwest where we saw significantly more days with rain and cloud cover. Maybe that’s why we were a bit naive in thinking that Boise HAS to be one of the sunniest cities in the country. 

According to Moving.com, which ranked the 25 Sunniest Cities in the United States last June, Boise doesn’t even make the Top 25. Through their research, they discovered that Phoenix, Arizona is the sunniest city in the nation, with an average of 299 sunny days a year. Little Rock, Arkansas took the last spot on their list with an average of 217 sunny days a year. The national average for sunny days is 205. 

So how does Boise ACTUALLY stack up? Boise gets one more sunny day than the national average, but at 206 sunny days a year, it doesn’t even crack the list of Top 10 Cities with the Most Sunshine in Idaho! 

To determine this list, we looked at Best Place’s climate data for Idaho cities with a population of at least 5,000 people and ranked them based on their average number of sunny days per year. To break ties, we used the number of sunshine hours for each city assembled by the team at Climate-Data.org. After crunching the numbers, if you could use some extra and natural Vitamin D, these are the cities basking residents in the most sunshine!