Best Places to Live With Migraines: The 20 Calmest US Cities

Measured by the barometer alone, the best places to live with migraines in the United States are Honolulu, San Diego, Miami, Tampa and Los Angeles. Those five are the calmest of the 100 largest metros in the 2026 U.S. Migraine Risk Index, which we built from three years of hourly pressure readings. Honolulu recorded a severe pressure swing on 0.3 days per year and scored 0.04 out of 100, where a higher score means more challenging weather.

All 20 of the most favorable metros sit in the same few places: Hawaii, California, the Arizona desert, and the Gulf South from Florida to Louisiana. None has a trigger season longer than two months, and 10 have none at all. For contrast, the 20 most challenging metros run a median season of 8 months with about 104 severe-swing days a year, while the calm 20 have a median of about 20.

Below are all 20 with their numbers, what makes each group calm, and what a ranking like this cannot tell you about your own attacks.

The 20 calmest U.S. metros for migraine weather

Rank 100 is the calmest. The score combines three measured factors: how many months count as trigger season, how many days a year carry a severe swing, and baseline pressure. A month counts as trigger season when at least 35% of its days saw a pressure drop of 5 hPa or more within 24 hours, the same rule behind our month by month season calendar.

Just outside the list, ranks 76 to 80 belong to Corpus Christi, Houston, Savannah, Atlanta and Birmingham, each with a season of two or three months. The full report ranks all 100.

Honolulu and coastal California: the flattest barometers

No other metro comes close to Honolulu. Its worst month is January, when 2.2% of days recorded a qualifying drop, against the 35% that would make a month count. Nine of its twelve months recorded none at all.

The coastal California four follow. San Diego logged 2.0 severe-swing days per year and Los Angeles 7.0, neither with a single trigger month. San Francisco and San Jose sit at 10.3 and 10.7 days, and each has exactly one trigger month, February, when 40% and 37.6% of days qualified. In every other month of the year, neither city tops 24.7%.

Florida and the Gulf South: one short winter season

Nine of the 20 are in Florida, Alabama and Louisiana. Miami is the calmest of them at 3.7 severe-swing days per year, and its worst month, February, reaches only 15.3% of days. Tampa follows at 11.0 days. Neither has a trigger month.

The other seven each have a short winter season. In Orlando, Jacksonville, Pensacola, Mobile and New Orleans it is January alone, while Tallahassee and Baton Rouge add February. Orlando only just qualifies, at 36.6% of January days, and has the fewest severe swings of the seven at 15.0 a year. Baton Rouge has the most, 31.0, and with its two month season that puts it last on this list.

Summer barely registers on this measure anywhere on the list. From June through September, no month in any of the 20 metros recorded a qualifying drop on more than 6.5% of its days.

The Arizona desert and the Central Valley: calm seasons, busier swings

This is the group where the score alone can mislead. Phoenix and Mesa have no trigger month, peaking at 24.7% of January days, yet they record 70.0 and 68.0 severe-swing days per year. The median across all 100 metros is 77.9, and Phoenix records more severe swings than 43 of them do. Both rank as favorable mainly because season length carries the most weight in the score, 53.3%.

Tucson is calmer on both counts, with 29.7 severe-swing days and a January peak of 26.9%. It also has the lowest mean surface pressure on the list, 928.8 hPa, because of its elevation, and the index counts a lower baseline against a city at 13.3% of the score.

In California's Central Valley, Sacramento has one trigger month, February at 42.4%, and 19.3 severe-swing days. Fresno and Bakersfield have none. Fresno is still the closest call of the 10 metros without a season: its February reached 34.1% of days, less than a percentage point short of the line. Bakersfield peaks at 31.8% in the same month and logs 29.4 severe-swing days.

None of these scores knows anything about heat or air quality. The index measures pressure only, so a desert summer or a smoky week in the valley does not appear in any number above. If either affects you, weigh it separately.

What a calm barometer cannot promise

Weather is a trigger for many people with migraine, but not for everyone. In a study of 1,207 patients published in Cephalalgia in 2007, Kelman found 53.2% named weather as a trigger. Stress (79.7%), hormones in women (65.1%) and not eating (57.3%) were all more common, and heat was named by 30.3%. Close to half the people in that study did not name weather at all, and a move changes none of the other triggers.

The research on weather itself is mixed. A 2024 review in Current Pain and Headache Reports put weather's effect on migraine attacks at around 20%, called recent results inconsistent, and concluded that weather combined with other factors appears to matter more than weather alone.

Whether relocating actually reduces attacks is a different question from which barometer is calmest, and we cover what is known about it in can moving fix weather migraines. One point belongs here, though. If your attacks are becoming more frequent, or the pattern is changing in a way you cannot explain, bring that to your doctor before you decide where to live.

Test your own weather sensitivity first

A calm city only helps if pressure is one of your triggers, and a few months of records will tell you more than any ranking can. The test is simple to describe: logged attacks set against the days the barometer moved. Some tracking apps record the weather for you. MigrAid, for example, saves barometric pressure, temperature and humidity automatically with every entry on iPhone and Android, and checks your logs for a weather correlation.

I built MigrAid for my mom and my wife, who both get migraines. Of all the questions they asked about their attacks, the weather one was the hardest to settle from memory.

If you are visiting a candidate city first, its free forecast page shows the coming days of pressure measured at the city's own elevation. The pages for Honolulu, San Diego, Miami and Phoenix are a good place to start, and each city in the table links to its own.

How these numbers were made

Every figure on this page comes from the Risk Index data: hourly surface pressure from the Open-Meteo historical archive, April 1, 2023 through March 31, 2026, for the 100 largest U.S. metros. Readings are scaled to a sea-level equivalent, multiplied by 1013.25 and divided by the city's mean surface pressure, so a swing in Tucson is compared fairly with the same relative swing at the coast.

A day counts toward the season when the worst 24 hour change ending in it is a drop of 5 hPa or more, and a month counts when 35% of its days qualify. A severe-swing day is a drop of 10 hPa or more within 24 hours, or 5 hPa or more within 6 hours. The score weights season length at 53.3%, severe swings at 33.3% and baseline pressure at 13.3%, each normalized across the 100 metros. The report's methodology section carries the full detail.

The 5 hPa threshold comes from published research. In a year long diary study of 28 migraine patients, published in Internal Medicine in 2011, Kimoto and colleagues found migraine frequency rose when pressure fell by more than 5 hPa from the day of the headache to the day after.

Three years is a climate record, not a forecast, and it says nothing about whether you personally will have fewer attacks somewhere else. Weather is one trigger among many, and this index does not score heat, humidity, air quality or anything about healthcare.