Texas Winters Are Getting Shorter, but the Cold Snaps Are Getting Sharper: The Cities Where Furnaces Now Run 18 Fewer Days a Year (2026 Study)

Key findings

Texas heating demand has fallen 14% since the 1990s. Across 19 Texas cities, the average winter now produces 1,672 heating degree days, down from 1,954 in the 1991 to 2001 winters.
Furnaces run 18 fewer days a year. The statewide average number of days with a mean temperature below 65°F dropped from 147 to 130. Every one of the 19 cities lost furnace days.
But the coldest night of the year is now 4.6°F colder. The average coldest night fell from 20.8°F in the 1990s to 16.2°F in the last ten winters. Eighteen of 19 cities saw their coldest night get colder. Remove the Winter Storm Uri winter entirely and the average is still 3.5°F colder.
Hard-freeze nights have not gone away. Nights at or below 20°F averaged 4.0 per winter in the 1990s and 4.0 per winter in the last decade, even as total cold fell. Thirteen of 19 cities now get more of them.
Sub-zero Texas is spreading. Nine of the 19 cities recorded a night below 0°F in the last ten winters. In the 1990s, only Amarillo did.
Austin has lost 20 furnace days but gained hard freezes. Austin’s Camp Mabry station now averages 116 furnace days a winter, down from 136, yet it hit 20°F or colder in seven of the last ten winters, compared with one of ten in the 1990s.

Texas has never been a furnace state. Most of the year, the heating system in a Central Texas home is the equipment nobody thinks about. This study set out to measure how much that has changed over 35 winters, using the same daily temperature records the National Weather Service uses.

The answer is two stories at once. The ordinary winter has shrunk. Heating demand across Texas is down 14% since the 1990s, the freeze season is about nine days shorter, and the typical furnace now runs for 130 days a year instead of 147. Homeowners in Houston, Brownsville, El Paso and College Station have lost roughly three weeks of heating weather.

The extraordinary winter has not shrunk. The coldest night of the year has gotten colder in 18 of 19 cities, the number of hard-freeze nights has held steady, and nine cities have seen a below-zero reading in the last decade. The result is a state where heating systems sit idle longer and then get asked to do more on the one night that matters.

Full rankings: how each Texas city’s winter has changed

Baseline is the ten winters from 1991-92 through 2000-01. Recent is the ten winters from 2016-17 through 2025-26. Ranked by percentage decline in heating degree days (largest decline first).

Texas Cities: Heating Demand and Winter Trends
Rank	City	Heating degree days, 1990s	Heating degree days, last 10 winters	Change	Furnace days, 1990s	Furnace days, recent	Furnace days lost	Coldest night avg, 1990s (°F)	Coldest night avg, recent (°F)	Hard-freeze nights per winter, 1990s	Hard-freeze nights per winter, recent	Coldest reading, last 10 winters (°F)
1	Brownsville	530	399	-24.6%	70	53	-17	34.1	30.6	0.0	0.0	22.1
2	Houston	1,399	1,089	-22.1%	129	108	-21	25.6	21.8	0.1	0.5	13.1
3	El Paso	2,378	1,890	-20.5%	176	154	-22	17.3	20.8	2.5	1.0	14.2
4	College Station	1,625	1,312	-19.2%	139	118	-21	22.5	18.4	0.7	1.4	5.2
5	Beaumont-Port Arthur	1,339	1,084	-19.0%	128	108	-20	26.7	21.7	0.0	0.6	11.1
6	McAllen	542	446	-17.8%	66	55	-11	32.8	29.7	0.0	0.0	22.1
7	San Antonio	1,457	1,208	-17.1%	133	115	-18	22.9	19.7	0.4	1.1	9.1
8	Dallas-Fort Worth	2,275	1,899	-16.5%	165	145	-20	18.9	13.5	2.8	3.1	-1.8
9	Abilene	2,573	2,168	-15.7%	174	153	-22	15.3	8.8	5.0	5.9	-3.8
10	Austin	1,508	1,283	-14.9%	136	116	-20	25.5	19.0	0.2	1.6	7.2
11	San Angelo	2,296	1,974	-14.0%	169	148	-21	16.8	11.5	3.7	4.6	-0.8
12	Midland-Odessa	2,623	2,259	-13.9%	180	159	-21	14.5	9.1	6.1	5.2	-1.8
13	Amarillo	4,220	3,635	-13.9%	225	206	-19	5.2	-0.3	29.1	22.5	-10.8
14	Corpus Christi	839	730	-12.9%	94	80	-14	27.6	25.0	0.0	0.2	17.2
15	Lubbock	3,359	2,931	-12.8%	200	183	-16	9.7	4.6	14.4	12.7	-2.0
16	Victoria	1,159	1,015	-12.5%	118	101	-17	26.6	20.4	0.1	0.6	12.9
17	Wichita Falls	2,930	2,619	-10.6%	185	172	-14	14.3	6.8	7.8	8.4	-7.8
18	Waco	2,085	1,892	-9.3%	158	143	-14	20.4	13.2	1.5	3.8	-0.8
19	Tyler	1,982	1,927	-2.7%	154	147	-7	19.2	13.9	1.4	3.3	-0.9
Texas average (19 cities)		1,954	1,672	-14.4%	147	130	-18	20.8	16.2	4.0	4.0	—

Heating degree days (base 65°F) measure how much heating a building needs over a season. A furnace day is any day whose mean temperature is below 65°F. A hard-freeze night is a low of 20°F or below.

Notable findings

The Gulf Coast and the Valley have lost the most winter

Brownsville, Houston, Beaumont-Port Arthur and McAllen all cut their heating demand by about 18% to 25%. Houston lost 21 furnace days, the equivalent of three weeks of heating weather. For a Houston home, the furnace is now needed on 108 days a year, fewer than one day in three.

Callout: Houston’s freeze season has shrunk from 90 days to 55.

Tyler barely moved

East Texas is the exception. Tyler’s heating demand fell just 2.7%, the smallest change in the state, and it lost only seven furnace days. Its freeze days actually rose from 27 to 28 per winter, and hard-freeze nights more than doubled, from 1.4 to 3.3 per winter.

Callout: Tyler’s coldest night is now 5.3°F colder than it was in the 1990s.

The coldest night got colder almost everywhere

The average coldest night dropped in 18 of 19 cities, by 6.6°F in Austin, 7.2°F in Waco, 7.5°F in Wichita Falls and 6.5°F in Abilene. The only exception is El Paso, where the coldest night warmed by 3.5°F. This is not just Winter Storm Uri: with the 2020-21 winter removed, the statewide coldest-night average is still 17.4°F, against 20.8°F in the 1990s.

Callout: In the 1990s, 40 city-winters had a night at or below 15°F. In the last ten winters, 81 did.

Central Texas: fewer heating days, sharper extremes

Austin’s Camp Mabry station is the reference for the Austin metro, including Williamson County. Its winters now produce 1,283 heating degree days, down 15% from 1,508, and its furnace days fell from 136 to 116. But Austin reached 20°F or colder in seven of the last ten winters (2016-17, 2017-18, 2020-21, 2022-23, 2023-24, 2024-25 and 2025-26). In the 1990s it happened once, in 1995-96. Waco shows the same pattern: 14 fewer furnace days, but hard-freeze nights up from 1.5 to 3.8 a winter and a coldest night of -0.8°F in February 2021.

Callout: Austin’s average coldest night has fallen from 25.5°F to 19.0°F.

Sub-zero Texas is no longer a Panhandle story

In the 1990s, Amarillo was the only one of the 19 cities to record a night below 0°F. In the last ten winters, nine cities did: Amarillo (-10.8°F), Wichita Falls (-7.8°F), Abilene (-3.8°F), Lubbock (-2.0°F), Dallas-Fort Worth (-1.8°F), Midland-Odessa (-1.8°F), Tyler (-0.9°F), San Angelo (-0.8°F) and Waco (-0.8°F). All but Lubbock’s came during Winter Storm Uri in February 2021; Lubbock’s came in the 2025-26 winter.

Callout: Nine of 19 Texas cities have gone below zero since 2016. One did in the 1990s.

The trend line points the same way

Across all 35 winters, heating degree days are falling by about 107 per decade statewide, furnace days by 7 per decade, and the average coldest night by 1.6°F per decade. Hard-freeze nights show no trend at all (-0.003 per decade). Milder on average, unchanged at the extreme.

Suggested visual assets

Ranked bar chart: percentage change in heating degree days, 19 cities, Brownsville at top, Tyler at bottom.
Paired dot chart: average coldest night, 1990s versus last ten winters, one row per city, showing the near-universal drop.
Austin 35-winter line chart: furnace days (falling) and coldest night (falling) on the same axis, 1991-92 to 2025-26.

Embed code for each chart should be offered to journalists with a link back to this page.

Expert commentary

“What the data shows is a system that sits idle for longer and then gets tested harder. A furnace or heat pump in Hutto or Round Rock (using Austin weather as the local proxy) now runs about three weeks less than it did in the 1990s, so problems have more time to develop unnoticed. Then a 15-degree night arrives and it is asked to run flat out for 48 hours. The failures we see in January are almost never caused by that night. They were already there in October,” said the founder of Jurnee Mechanical Heating & Air Conditioning.

“The most useful thing a Central Texas homeowner can take from this is that the average winter is not the one that breaks equipment. Have the heating side inspected in the fall, know whether your system has a backup heat source, and do not judge your furnace by how little you have used it,” said the founder of Jurnee Mechanical Heating & Air Conditioning.

Methodology

Data source. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Global Historical Climatology Network Daily (GHCN-Daily). Elements: TMAX (daily maximum temperature) and TMIN (daily minimum temperature), published in tenths of a degree Celsius. One file per station, downloaded September 23, 2026 from https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/daily/by_station/. Station metadata from https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/daily/ghcnd-stations.txt. Any daily value carrying a NOAA quality-control flag was excluded.

Stations (19). Austin Camp Mabry (USW00013958), Waco Regional Airport (USW00013959), College Station Easterwood Field (USW00003904), San Antonio International (USW00012921), Houston Intercontinental (USW00012960), Dallas-Fort Worth International (USW00003927), Port Arthur Southeast Texas Regional (USW00012917), Corpus Christi (USW00012924), Victoria Regional (USW00012912), Brownsville (USW00012919), McAllen Miller International (USW00012959), Abilene Regional (USW00013962), San Angelo (USW00023034), Wichita Falls Municipal (USW00013966), Midland-Odessa (USW00023023), Lubbock (USW00023042), Amarillo (USW00023047), El Paso International (USW00023044), and the Tyler cooperative observer station (USC00419207). Stations were chosen for complete records: each has both readings on at least 99% of days across the 35-year period. Georgetown, Taylor, Temple, Killeen and Laredo stations were evaluated and excluded for gaps; Williamson County has no station with a complete 35-year record, so Austin Camp Mabry, the National Weather Service climate station for the Austin metro, is used as the Central Texas reference.

Timeframe. 35 heating seasons, July 1, 1991 to June 30, 2026. A season runs July 1 to June 30 and is labelled by the year it ends, so each winter falls inside one season.

Metrics, computed per station per season from the daily readings.

Heating degree days (HDD65): for each day, MAX(0, 65 minus the daily mean temperature in °F), where the daily mean is the average of TMAX and TMIN. Summed across the season. Requires both TMAX and TMIN.
Furnace days: number of days with a daily mean below 65°F (HDD65 greater than zero).
Freeze days: days with TMIN at or below 32°F. Hard-freeze days: TMIN at or below 20°F.
Coldest night: lowest TMIN in the season.
Freeze-season length: last freeze date minus first freeze date plus one.

Season validity. A season is included only if at least 95% of its days have both TMAX and TMIN. Three of 665 station-seasons fail this test and are excluded: McAllen 1997-98 (90.7% coverage), Tyler 1994-95 (91.0%) and Tyler 2005-06 (94.2%).

Comparison windows. Baseline: seasons ending 1992 through 2001 (winters 1991-92 to 2000-01). Recent: seasons ending 2017 through 2026 (winters 2016-17 to 2025-26). Each window average is the mean of the ten valid seasons. Change is recent minus baseline; percentage change is change divided by baseline. The statewide figure is the mean of the 19 city values; the statewide percentage change is the statewide mean change divided by the statewide mean baseline.

Trends. Ordinary least-squares slope of each metric on season year across all valid seasons for the station, expressed per decade.

Sensitivity check. Recent-window averages were recomputed with the 2020-21 season (Winter Storm Uri) excluded. Statewide, the average coldest night is 17.4°F without Uri versus 16.2°F with it, both colder than the 20.8°F baseline.

Limitations. Station readings represent the airport or observer site, not every neighborhood. Heating degree days measure demand, not fuel bills. The Tyler station is a cooperative observer site rather than an automated airport station.

Full methodology, raw data, the analysis script and a verification workbook with every formula are available on request.

About Jurnee Mechanical Heating & Air Conditioning

Jurnee Mechanical Heating & Air Conditioning is a family-owned HVAC company based in Hutto, Texas, serving Williamson County and the surrounding Central Texas communities. Founded by a technician with 24 years in the trade, the company installs, repairs and maintains air conditioners, furnaces, heat pumps and ductless systems for homes and businesses. Learn more at https://jurneemechanical.com/.