Average Tornadoes per Year by State (1996-2025)

What this chart shows. The average number of tornadoes a year in every US state and the District of Columbia over the 30 years from 1996 to 2025, from NOAA's Storm Prediction Center. Texas leads by a wide margin with 129.9 a year, followed by Kansas with 80.9, Oklahoma with 71.3 and Illinois with 64.5. Ten states averaged at least 50. At the other end, Alaska averaged 0.1 and the District of Columbia 0.2, but every one of the 51 recorded at least one tornado in the period.

How the data is collected. Each state's figure is its number of tornado records over 30 years divided by 30, counting a tornado that crossed a state line once in every state it entered. Texas alone accounts for 3,898 records in the period. Averaging over three decades smooths out single years, such as Kansas's low count of 29 in 2025.

Background. The Storm Prediction Center calls Tornado Alley a nickname in the popular media for a broad swath of relatively high tornado occurrence in the central United States, and notes that maps of it differ because tornado occurrence can be measured in many ways. The period here starts after the Doppler radar network was installed in the mid-1990s, when detection of weak tornadoes improved.

Limits. The averages are not adjusted for area, so they favour large states. Texas has the highest average partly because it is the largest of the lower 48 states, and a smaller state can see tornadoes more often per square mile with a lower count.