Pittsburgh, PA
#1- Searches / 1k HH
- 54.4
- vs weather
- 3.18x
- Median home built
- 1942
- Frozen / burst pipe
- 5.9
Winter Home Emergency Index · 2026 edition
The US cities where residents search hardest for heat and burst-pipe help
We ranked the 100 largest US cities by typical December–February search demand for furnace, frozen-pipe and emergency plumber help, per 1,000 households. Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Denver are the top cities that also hold up when measured against their whole metro.
Key findings
- 1Pittsburgh is the top confirmed city with 54.4 typical Dec–Feb searches per 1,000 households, first in the ranking and 18 times the rate in Laredo, TX, which ranks last.
- 213 of the top 25 cities pass the ranking check. 12 don't, including Atlanta, St. Louis and Cincinnati: they rank high on city-limits households but not on metro population. See the ranking check below.
- 3Pittsburgh searches 3.18x what its winter cold predicts, the most of any confirmed city.
- 4Three of the six highest confirmed cities have old housing. In Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Buffalo, more than 80% of homes were built before 1980.
- 5Nashville spikes hardest. Its peak winter month runs 3.32x its yearly average, the sharpest jump of any city, ahead of Wichita and Austin.
Full rankings
| 1 | Pittsburgh, PA | 3.18x | 5.9 | 83% | Confirmed | |
| 2 | Cleveland, OH | 3.04x | 4.1 | 86% | Confirmed | |
| 3 | Atlanta, GA | 2.80x | 4.7 | 44% | Not confirmed | |
| 4 | Denver, CO | 2.16x | 2.6 | 57% | Confirmed | |
| 5 | St. Louis, MO | 2.21x | 3.1 | 86% | Not confirmed | |
| 6 | Cincinnati, OH | 2.16x | 4.0 | 81% | Not confirmed | |
| 7 | St. Paul, MN | 1.73x | 2.9 | 79% | Not confirmed | |
| 8 | Minneapolis, MN | 1.64x | 4.1 | 73% | Not confirmed | |
| 9 | Buffalo, NY | 1.68x | 4.1 | 90% | Confirmed | |
| 10 | Detroit, MI | 1.48x | 2.6 | 90% | Not confirmed | |
| 11 | Indianapolis, IN | 1.50x | 2.9 | 60% | Confirmed | |
| 12 | Frisco, TX | 1.84x | 1.8 | 2% | Not confirmed | |
| 13 | Kansas City, MO | 1.39x | 2.5 | 64% | Not confirmed | |
| 14 | Fort Wayne, IN | 1.26x | 3.2 | 65% | Confirmed | |
| 15 | Dallas, TX | 1.86x | 1.5 | 50% | Not confirmed | |
| 16 | Portland, OR | 1.56x | 0.7 | 64% | Confirmed | |
| 17 | Colorado Springs, CO | 1.27x | 1.4 | 40% | Confirmed | |
| 18 | Louisville, KY | 1.31x | 2.6 | 62% | Confirmed | |
| 19 | Toledo, OH | 1.17x | 2.2 | 84% | Confirmed | |
| 20 | Fort Worth, TX | 1.62x | 1.2 | 35% | Not confirmed | |
| 21 | Richmond, VA | 1.36x | 3.2 | 72% | Not confirmed | |
| 22 | Columbus, OH | 1.13x | 1.8 | 51% | Confirmed | |
| 23 | Baltimore, MD | 1.21x | 2.5 | 83% | Not confirmed | |
| 24 | Lexington, KY | 1.17x | 2.4 | 46% | Confirmed | |
| 25 | Omaha, NE | 1.00x | 1.4 | 62% | Confirmed | |
| 26 | Raleigh, NC | 1.30x | 1.6 | 24% | – | |
| 27 | Plano, TX | 1.33x | 1.5 | 19% | – | |
| 28 | Milwaukee, WI | 0.90x | 1.8 | 85% | – | |
| 29 | Seattle, WA | 1.15x | 1.1 | 54% | – | |
| 30 | Lubbock, TX | 1.15x | 1.9 | 46% | – | |
| 31 | San Jose, CA | 1.45x | 0.6 | 61% | – | |
| 32 | Orlando, FL | 2.43x | 2.2 | 33% | – | |
| 33 | Winston-Salem, NC | 1.11x | 1.7 | 50% | – | |
| 34 | Nashville, TN | 1.10x | 2.5 | 42% | – | |
| 35 | Chicago, IL | 0.88x | 2.1 | 77% | – | |
| 36 | Garland, TX | 1.31x | 1.5 | 54% | – | |
| 37 | Charlotte, NC | 1.13x | 1.5 | 29% | – | |
| 38 | Aurora, CO | 0.89x | 1.4 | 38% | – | |
| 39 | Tulsa, OK | 1.02x | 1.5 | 65% | – | |
| 40 | Las Vegas, NV | 1.24x | 0.7 | 23% | – | |
| 41 | Sacramento, CA | 1.21x | 0.8 | 55% | – | |
| 42 | Chesapeake, VA | 1.06x | 1.4 | 32% | – | |
| 43 | Memphis, TN | 1.04x | 1.8 | 67% | – | |
| 44 | Wichita, KS | 0.86x | 1.7 | 58% | – | |
| 45 | Greensboro, NC | 0.94x | 1.9 | 45% | – | |
| 46 | Philadelphia, PA | 0.84x | 1.8 | 84% | – | |
| 47 | Virginia Beach, VA | 0.98x | 1.4 | 40% | – | |
| 48 | Mesa, AZ | 1.55x | 0.6 | 30% | – | |
| 49 | Boston, MA | 0.78x | 2.4 | 74% | – | |
| 50 | Houston, TX | 1.36x | 1.3 | 48% | – | |
| 51 | Oklahoma City, OK | 0.82x | 1.7 | 49% | – | |
| 52 | Durham, NC | 0.87x | 1.7 | 31% | – | |
| 53 | Scottsdale, AZ | 1.19x | 0.8 | 29% | – | |
| 54 | Anaheim, CA | 1.19x | 0.9 | 66% | – | |
| 55 | Austin, TX | 1.05x | 1.2 | 29% | – | |
| 56 | Boise, ID | 0.65x | 1.0 | 43% | – | |
| 57 | Norfolk, VA | 0.78x | 1.7 | 68% | – | |
| 58 | San Antonio, TX | 1.01x | 0.9 | 44% | – | |
| 59 | Tampa, FL | 1.69x | 1.2 | 46% | – | |
| 60 | Arlington, TX | 0.85x | 1.1 | 36% | – | |
| 61 | Miami, FL | 3.14x | 1.8 | 52% | – | |
| 62 | Tucson, AZ | 1.00x | 0.8 | 53% | – | |
| 63 | Irving, TX | 0.80x | 1.4 | 37% | – | |
| 64 | Lincoln, NE | 0.53x | 1.1 | 49% | – | |
| 65 | Gilbert, AZ | 1.13x | 0.9 | 4% | – | |
| 66 | Albuquerque, NM | 0.62x | 0.8 | 48% | – | |
| 67 | Riverside, CA | 0.94x | 1.0 | 56% | – | |
| 68 | Anchorage, AK | 0.44x | 2.4 | 45% | – | |
| 69 | New Orleans, LA | 0.93x | 2.1 | 75% | – | |
| 70 | Stockton, CA | 0.73x | 0.5 | 51% | – | |
| 71 | Los Angeles, CA | 1.00x | 0.4 | 71% | – | |
| 72 | Washington, DC | 0.58x | 1.7 | 70% | – | |
| 73 | Reno, NV | 0.55x | 1.4 | 38% | – | |
| 74 | Newark, NJ | 0.52x | 1.6 | 66% | – | |
| 75 | Madison, WI | 0.43x | 1.5 | 52% | – | |
| 76 | Irvine, CA | 0.97x | 1.0 | 21% | – | |
| 77 | Santa Ana, CA | 0.93x | 0.9 | 77% | – | |
| 78 | San Francisco, CA | 0.68x | 0.6 | 77% | – | |
| 79 | Bakersfield, CA | 0.64x | 0.5 | 35% | – | |
| 80 | Jersey City, NJ | 0.45x | 1.5 | 58% | – | |
| 81 | St. Petersburg, FL | 1.27x | 0.9 | 71% | – | |
| 82 | El Paso, TX | 0.57x | 0.8 | 45% | – | |
| 83 | Chandler, AZ | 0.81x | 1.0 | 10% | – | |
| 84 | Fresno, CA | 0.55x | 0.7 | 51% | – | |
| 85 | Henderson, NV | 0.56x | 0.6 | 7% | – | |
| 86 | Jacksonville, FL | 0.75x | 0.6 | 41% | – | |
| 87 | Corpus Christi, TX | 0.76x | 0.8 | 48% | – | |
| 88 | San Diego, CA | 0.67x | 0.3 | 54% | – | |
| 89 | Phoenix, AZ | 0.60x | 0.4 | 42% | – | |
| 90 | New York, NY | 0.35x | 1.1 | 80% | – | |
| 91 | Port St. Lucie, FL | 0.92x | 0.9 | 9% | – | |
| 92 | Glendale, AZ | 0.63x | 0.7 | 37% | – | |
| 93 | Oakland, CA | 0.44x | 0.5 | 78% | – | |
| 94 | North Las Vegas, NV | 0.40x | 0.7 | 13% | – | |
| 95 | Chula Vista, CA | 0.58x | 0.8 | 44% | – | |
| 96 | Honolulu, HI | – | 0.9 | 67% | – | |
| 97 | Long Beach, CA | 0.43x | 0.5 | 80% | – | |
| 98 | Cape Coral, FL | 0.73x | 0.7 | 16% | – | |
| 99 | Hialeah, FL | 0.99x | 0.7 | 60% | – | |
| 100 | Laredo, TX | 0.37x | 1.2 | 24% | – |
Ranking check: who makes the cut
The ranking divides each city's searches by the households inside its city limits. That can overstate cities whose limits hold a small share of their metro, because Google counts searches from a wider area. So we also rank every city by searches per metro resident. A city is confirmed only if it ranks in the top 25 on both.
Confirmed (13)
Where heat and burst-pipe search demand runs high
Confirmed city spotlights
Cleveland, OH
#2- Searches / 1k HH
- 51.7
- vs weather
- 3.04x
- Median home built
- 1940
- Frozen / burst pipe
- 4.1
Denver, CO
#4- Searches / 1k HH
- 36.7
- vs weather
- 2.16x
- Median home built
- 1974
- Frozen / burst pipe
- 2.6
Methodology
We pulled monthly Google Ads search volume for 30 heating, frozen-pipe and emergency plumbing terms in each of the 100 largest US cities, from October 2022 to September 2026. Each city's December–February total is divided by its households from the Census ACS 2023 5-year estimates.
Close variants that Google reports as one shared number are counted once. To stop one-off data spikes skewing the ranking, each month uses the median of that calendar month across four years.
"vs weather" compares each city's searches with what its normal winter cold predicts. We took NOAA's 1991–2020 heating degree days for each city's nearest long-running airport station and fitted one line through all 99 cities: searches per 1,000 households against heating degree days (both on a log scale). A city's figure is its actual searches divided by what that line predicts for its climate, so 2.00x means twice the expected level. Climate explains only 36% of the difference between cities, so treat this as a rough guide, not a precise measure.
What this measures: search demand, not breakdowns or insurance claims. Searches come from anyone in the city, owners and renters alike, and are divided by all households. "City" is the location as Google Ads defines it; households are city limits.
Embed this chart
Cite: Home Stats Data, "Winter Home Emergency Index: 2026 edition," October 24, 2026, https://homestatsdata.com/plumbing/frozen-pipe-statistics/
Also see the Summer AC Emergency Index.