Drought in Every State

On the U.S. Drought Monitor week valid August 25, 2026, 56.6% of the contiguous United States was in moderate drought or worse and 77.5% was at least abnormally dry. Those are USDM's own published area percentages. The worst week in the whole USDM record for the contiguous states was September 25, 2012, at 65.5%.

It is the weekly national drought map, produced jointly by the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, NOAA and NASA. A rotating group of authors builds each week's map from several indicators plus reports from local observers, and it is released Thursday mornings for conditions valid the preceding Tuesday. It is the map that federal disaster designations, many state drought plans and a lot of insurance and utility triggers actually run on. Its area percentages are on this page as numbers, and the map itself is at droughtmonitor.unl.edu.

Because drought does not mean the same thing everywhere, and NOAA's own drought portal says so: "Drought’s effects also vary from region to region. Due to climatic differences, what might be considered a drought in one part of the country may not be a drought somewhere else." A rainless August in Sacramento is the normal state of the world; the same August in Jackson, Mississippi is an event. So each state page is shaped by that state's precipitation climatology and its actual USDM record: whether it has a real dry season, whether it is short of water in a normal year, whether its rain arrives with the growing season, or none of the above.

The National Weather Service names four. Meteorological: "Meteorological drought is based on the degree of dryness (rainfall deficit) and the length of the dry period." Hydrologic: "Hydrologic drought is based on the impact of rainfall deficits on the water supply such as stream flow, reservoir and lake levels, and ground water table decline." Agricultural: "Agricultural drought is based on the impacts to agriculture by factors such as rainfall deficits, soil water deficits, reduced groundwater, or reservoir levels needed for irrigation." And socioeconomic, which is what happens when demand for water outruns supply. They can move independently, which is why a state can be out of meteorological drought and still have empty reservoirs.

Because the surface and subsurface parts of the water system respond on completely different clocks. USGS: "The first evidence of drought usually is seen in records of rainfall. Within a short period of time, the amount of moisture in soils can begin to decrease. The effects of a drought on flow in streams and reservoirs may not be noticed for several weeks or months. Water levels in wells may not reflect a shortage of rainfall for a year or more after a drought begins (Moreland, 1993)." That lag runs in both directions, which is also why a river can look perfectly normal several weeks into a dry spell.

The U.S. Drought Monitor's. Its five categories are the scale that federal disaster designations, state drought plans and water utilities actually run on, and USGS streamflow percentiles are the other half of the picture: the categories say how a region stands, the percentiles say what a particular river is doing today. Every figure on these pages is an agency figure, attributed to the agency that published it.

Several. On the U.S. Drought Monitor record since January 4, 2000, a group of northern and northeastern states has never had any area at all in D4, the top category, and Alaska has never even reached ten percent of its area in D2. The state table on this page carries each state's deepest recorded category and the week it happened, so you can see which ones those are.