When Does It Snow in Vancouver? First-Snow Dates for 18 Canadian Cities, Mapped

Last winter, Vancouver's airport weather station didn't record a single centimetre of snow. Not one day with even 1 cm, from July 2025 to June 2026 (just a few traces). In a normal recent winter, the first real snow (1 cm or more) shows up around Dec 19, and some years it doesn't come until February.

Environment Canada says that was Vancouver's first snow-free winter since 1982-83, according to The Canadian Press. By then Toronto's airport had already logged 188.8 cm. So with October here, and Calgary and Fort St. John usually seeing their first snow around the middle of the month, I pulled 10 years of daily weather for 18 Canadian cities (nine in BC) from Environment and Climate Change Canada and answered the questions people actually ask: when does it snow in Vancouver, which city gets the most snow, which is the rainiest, and where would you be happiest.

Below: an interactive map of Canada, each city's snow calendar, the wet-day rankings (Vancouver doesn't win), a "weather twin" finder, a quiz, and what any of it means if you're buying a home.

The map

Every dot is a city's airport weather station, which is where Environment Canada keeps its longest, most complete daily records. The default layer shows each city's typical first-snow date: the median date of the first day with at least 1 cm of new snow, over the snow seasons from 2016-17 to 2025-26 with complete records. Fort St. John is first in line, around Oct 13. Victoria and Vancouver bring up the rear.

The snow calendar: when the first and last snow arrive

Here's every city, sorted from earliest first snow to latest. "Snow by Halloween" counts the seasons in which 1 cm of snow had already fallen by October 31. A few seasons are left out for some cities because the station had gaps in its snowfall records that fall (the table shows how many seasons count). The earliest and latest dates come from those same complete seasons.

4 of the 18 cities had their first snow by Halloween in at least half the seasons: Fort St. John, Yellowknife, Calgary and Edmonton. If you're trick-or-treating in Fort St. John, plan the costume around a parka. At the other end, Vancouver and Victoria have never had a first snow before November in this decade of data, and Abbotsford's earliest was Nov 2, 2017.

The spring end is where the gap really shows. St. John's typical last snow is around May 21, with one as late as Jun 10, 2021. Vancouver's is around Feb 23. That's roughly three extra months of possible snow on the Rock.

When does it snow in Vancouver? Winter by winter

Short answer: in Vancouver, snow is a December-to-February event, and you can't count on it at all. The first 1 cm day landed in November in 2 of the 9 complete seasons, in December in 3, and in January or later (or never) in 4. The earliest was Nov 7, 2022. The snowiest winter in the set was 2022–23, with 84 cm over 11 days, and the biggest single day was 27.8 cm on Jan 17, 2024.

The last snow of the season usually comes around Feb 23. Across all 10 years, Vancouver averaged 39 cm of snow a year over about 7 days with 1 cm or more.

One caveat that matters if you live here: this is the airport, on Sea Island, basically at sea level. My read: anyone in North Vancouver up the hill, on Burnaby Mountain or in the upper parts of Coquitlam knows the airport number undersells their winter. The station tells you about the city's low-lying core, not every street.

The snowiest cities in Canada (of these 18)

St. John's wins, at 333 cm a year, with the single biggest snow day of any city here: 76.2 cm on Jan 17, 2020. Charlottetown (252 cm), Terrace (247 cm) and Ottawa (243 cm) round out the top four. Yes, Terrace, in northwest BC, outsnows Ottawa and Montreal. It also has more wet days than any other BC city in the set, and in winter a lot of that comes down as snow.

Calgary (149 cm) gets more snow than Edmonton (113 cm), and Yellowknife, for all its cold, only gets 124 cm. It's too dry up there to snow much. At the bottom, Vancouver (39.0 cm) and Victoria (38.8 cm) are a dead heat.

Is Vancouver the rainiest city in Canada?

No, though it's near the top. I counted "wet days": days with at least 1 mm of precipitation (rain, or snow measured as melted water). Here's the ranking.

St. John's has the most wet days (161 a year), then Terrace (158), Abbotsford (141) and Vancouver (132). By total amount, the wettest are St. John's (1,500 mm a year), Abbotsford (1,461 mm) and Halifax (1,455 mm). Vancouver's airport averaged 1,147 mm, and Abbotsford, an hour up the valley, got about 27% more than that.

What Vancouver does have is a long, steady wet season and the occasional epic streak. Its longest run of consecutive wet days in this data was 20 days, from Jan 16 to Feb 4, 2018. Kamloops' longest was 7.

That chart is the real Vancouver story. December averages 181 mm at the airport and July just 18 mm. Halifax is wet all year round. Calgary is the opposite of Vancouver: its wettest months are June and July.

Frost days, freezer days and 30°C days

Yellowknife is in freezer mode 172 days a year: the temperature never gets above zero. Edmonton has the coldest reading in the set, -45.9°C on Jan 12, 2024. Vancouver gets 39 frosty nights a year and about 3 days that stay below zero.

The heat column is the surprise. Kamloops averages 49 days a year at 30°C or more, more than Toronto (22) and Montreal (17) combined, and it hit 47.3°C on Jun 29, 2021, during the 2021 heat dome. Abbotsford gets about 13 hot days a year. Vancouver's airport, cooled by the ocean, averages 0.5.

What this means if you're buying a home

For the numbers that move prices, my Greater Vancouver market update has the latest benchmark prices and sales, and if you like this kind of open-data digging, see what each Vancouver neighbourhood complains about to 3-1-1. To browse homes, start with the 4,742 Vancouver listings on the EstateBlock map, or get an instant evaluation of your own place.

How I did this

All weather data comes from Environment and Climate Change Canada's daily climate records (climate.weather.gc.ca), pulled through its GeoMet OGC API for one airport station per city, from January 1, 2016 to June 30, 2026. Yearly figures (snow, wet days, frost, heat) are averages for the 10 calendar years 2016 to 2025. To handle the odd missing day, each one is the total over days with data, divided by the number of days with data, times 365.25. Every station has snow and precipitation data on at least 95.8% of days, and temperatures on at least 94.6%.

A "snow day" is a day with at least 1 cm of new snow, which is also the threshold Environment Canada uses for an official snowfall in Vancouver. A snow season runs July 1 to June 30. The typical first-snow date is the median over the 10 seasons from 2016-17 to 2025-26, skipping any season in which the station was missing more than 5% of its snowfall readings from August to December (most often fall 2020); the last-snow date works the same way for January to June. A season with no 1 cm day at all counts as the latest possible first snow.

The 18 are a mix of big Canadian cities and BC centres whose airport station reports daily snowfall for the whole period. Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, Quebec City, Kelowna, Prince George and Whitehorse are missing because their airport stations don't publish daily snow totals for these years (Quebec City's stopped in 2017), and I wasn't going to estimate them. "Wet days" count precipitation of 1 mm or more, so a day of snow counts too. City nicknames are mine and a joke. Base map from Natural Earth (public domain); Southern BC is zoomed in on the map.