How Much Snow Does Western Mass Get? Every Town's Winter, Measured

Two towns in this region sit about forty miles apart. One averages 85.3 inches of snow a year. The other averages 36.5. That is more than double, inside a region you can cross in ninety minutes, and nothing about it is random.

If you are moving here, this is one of the few genuinely large physical differences between towns, and it shows up in your driveway, your heating bill, your roof and your insurance.

The hills make the weather

The Connecticut River valley floor sits at a couple of hundred feet. The Berkshire plateau and the Franklin County hilltowns run well above a thousand, and several towns sit higher still. Air cooling as it rises is the whole mechanism, and the consequences are consistent and predictable.

Average winter temperature ranges from 21.8 degrees in Plainfield to 29.7 in East Longmeadow. Eight degrees of average is an enormous difference in practice. It decides whether a storm falls as rain or snow, how long what falls stays on the ground, and how many freeze-thaw cycles your driveway, your foundation and the road outside go through each year.

The valley towns get the mildest winters in the region. The hilltowns get real ones. The line between them is elevation, and you can see it on a map of the snowfall column below.

What extra snow actually costs

People treat this as a lifestyle preference. It is partly a budget item.

• Plowing. A long dirt driveway in a town averaging seven feet of snow is a seasonal contract, not a Saturday morning. Ask what the current owner pays.
• Heating. More cold days means more fuel. The dominant fuel column matters here: the towns with the most snow are overwhelmingly the towns with no gas main, which means delivered oil or propane at delivered-fuel prices.
• Roofs. Snow load is a real structural consideration in the hilltowns, and ice damming on an under-insulated 1890 roof is one of the most common expensive problems in this region.
• Access. Many hilltown roads are unpaved and some are not maintained in winter at all. That is a question to ask the town's highway department about a specific road, before you offer.

What the numbers are and are not

These are climate normals: the 1991 to 2020 averages published by NOAA and interpolated to each town. They describe a thirty-year average, which is the right basis for comparing one town with another and the wrong basis for predicting a particular winter.

A town averaging 36.5 inches can have a four-foot winter. A town averaging 85.3 can have a green Christmas. Averages are for choosing a town, not for deciding whether to buy a snowblower this year.

Every town, snow and winter temperature

Sortable and filterable. Sort by snowfall and the geography assembles itself: the hilltowns at one end, the valley floor at the other.

Pricing the winter you are buying

A season of heat is the number that connects all of this to money, and it moves every week with the fuel market. The heat index tracks it back to 1990 for oil, propane and a heat pump, and the comparison between them has flipped 31 times, which is worth knowing before you commit to a system.

Each town's own record carries its snowfall, its winter average, what most homes there burn and whether a gas main reaches it. Start at the town list.

One caveat that applies to every figure above and deserves its own reading: only nineteen weather stations cover all 101 towns, so a hill town's published snowfall was very likely measured in a valley, and it understates. And who supplies the power matters more here than elsewhere, because an ice storm on a rural overhead line is the event that actually disrupts a winter.