How Much Snow Does It Take to Close School? What Districts and Data Say

Everyone who grew up with snow days has a theory about the magic number. We collected every threshold we could trace to a source — district pages, news reports, a crowdsourced map and an academic study — and put them in one table. The short version: the number depends heavily on where you live, and many districts don’t publish one at all.

Methodology

We built the dataset in October 2026 from sources we opened and read. Each of the 32 rows records the place, the reported snow threshold (or a note), any cold-weather policy, the source URL, and a source type:

Three cautions. First, many rows come from articles that are several years old, so read them as “reported in [year],” not as current policy. Second, the crowdsourced map was built from hundreds of reader responses interpolated with NOAA’s map of average annual snowfall days; its creator noted that wind chill matters more than snow in the Midwest and Great Plains, that elevation makes averages misleading in the West, and that big cities need more snow to close. Third, we left out anything we could not open and confirm, including figures attributed to commenters on the original Reddit thread.

The full dataset

Download the dataset as CSV (32 rows, UTF-8, columns: place, state, typical_threshold_inches_or_note, cold_policy, source_url, source_type, notes).

Cold-day thresholds

Minnesota has no statewide cold threshold. State law lets the governor, through the education commissioner, order schools closed; Gov. Walz declined to do so in January 2019, while former Govs. Carlson and Dayton did close schools for cold (MPR, 2019).

What the data shows

1. The local baseline sets the bar. Reported thresholds climb with how much snow a region usually gets: any snow in the Deep South, most of Texas and much of California; about 2–3 inches in southern Iowa; about 3 inches in central Illinois and Indiana; 4–5 inches in northeast Iowa; roughly 12 inches in Chicago’s suburbs outside Cook County; more than 2 feet along the Canadian border. As the Map Room blog put it in 2014, the map is an approximation, not a measure of toughness — places with little snow lack the equipment to clear it.

2. Closures are nonlinear in snow. In Massachusetts from 2003 to 2010, each extra day with 10 or more inches led to 0.51 additional school closings, while each day with 4 to under 10 inches led to only 0.04 — but 0.08 additional student absences. The average student lost about 2 days a year to weather closings and 8 to absences (Goodman, 2015).

3. Big cities close last. Chicago Public Schools closed for snow only four times from 1999 to 2014, each with 20+ inches on the ground, yet closed four times in January 2014 for extreme cold (CBS Chicago). A Cleveland meteorologist likewise notes that rural districts close more readily and big-city districts are often the last to close (WEWS).

4. Most districts don’t publish an inch number. 15 of the 32 rows have no snow threshold at all — including Montgomery County, Md., Denver and Wake County, N.C., which describe judgment calls based on forecast, roads, ice and timing.

5. Cold thresholds cluster, with wide outliers. Of the 17 rows with a cold policy, the Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa triggers center on −25°F air temperature or −25°F to −35°F wind chill. Northern districts go further (Bemidji −40°F, Grand Rapids ISD 318 −50°F), while Hazel Park, Mich. and Northeast Ohio sources point to about −15°F. Madison lowered its trigger from −35°F to −25°F in 2016 after noticing low attendance near −35°F.

6. Timing and ice can outweigh inches. A quarter to half an inch of freezing rain overnight is a serious problem in Northeast Ohio; Boise’s district calls ice the most dangerous condition; and Boston closed in January 2022 for a forecast of just several inches because about an inch an hour was expected between 5 and 8 a.m.

Snow days are turning into remote days

The thresholds above increasingly decide whether school goes online rather than whether students get a day off. New York City has used remote learning instead of traditional snow days since 2020; in January 2026 its mayor cited 6 inches as the general threshold for closing buildings, which now means remote instruction. By 2022–23, more than three-quarters of the 35 snowiest states had policies to curtail closures, up from half in 2018–19 (The 74). Minnesota allows 5 e-learning days a year, Pennsylvania 5 flexible instructional days, Maryland up to 8 remote days and Virginia 10.

Use the data

• Estimate tomorrow’s odds for your ZIP code with the snow day calculator, which uses these thresholds to set its snow-tolerance levels.
• State versions with remote-day rules and cold policies: Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, New York, Illinois, Wisconsin.
• Counting down to the end of the year? Try days until summer.