Largest Hailstones Ever Recorded: The US Record and Every State's Biggest Hail

The national record, every state's official record (and the many states that have none), and why the stone that sets a record is rarely the one in the first report.

What is the largest hailstone ever recorded in the United States? The Vivian hailstone. It fell on Vivian, South Dakota, in a storm on July 23, 2010, and was found by resident Les Scott: 8.0 inches in diameter, 18.62 inches around and 1.9375 pounds. NOAA's National Climate Extremes Committee certified it as the largest in diameter and the heaviest hailstone ever recovered in the US. Only 10 states have an official hailstone record, and three of those were certified in 2026: Illinois' 6.603-inch Kankakee stone (which fell in March 2026), Texas' 7.1-inch Vigo Park stone (2024) and a tie for Oklahoma's record. Below are the national record, every state's biggest hail (and how official that number is), the largest stones in the DisasterAWARE archive, and a map.

The US Record Hailstones

State Climate Extremes Committees certify up to four measurements: diameter (the longest axis), circumference, weight and volume. The headline national records:

• Diameter: 8.0 inches, Vivian, South Dakota, July 23, 2010. The stone had melted somewhat before the National Weather Service measured it, partly because a power outage hit the freezer where it was stored. Its record dimensions are the ones NWS Aberdeen measured.
• Weight: 1.9375 lb (1 lb 15 oz), the same Vivian stone. It displaced the stone that fell at Coffeyville, Kansas, in 1970.
• Circumference: 18.75 inches, Aurora, Nebraska, June 22, 2003, named the US record by NOAA in 2010 (Aurora's 7.0-inch stone was also the diameter record until Vivian). NCEI's state-record table now lists a larger circumference, 19.73 inches, for the 2021 Hondo, Texas stone (3D-scanned, measured around its widest cross-section); NOAA has not published a new national ruling.

Below Vivian, the largest certified state-record stones are 7.75 inches at Wichita, Kansas (September 15, 2010, two months after Vivian), 7.1 inches near Vigo Park, Texas (2024) and Aurora's 7.0 inches.

Every State's Official Hailstone Record

Climate records in the US are certified by a State Climate Extremes Committee (SCEC), a panel convened by NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) with the state climatologist and the National Weather Service. NCEI's table lists hail records for only nine states. Hawaii has a tenth, confirmed by NWS Honolulu with the committee. This is the complete list, ranked by diameter:

Sources: NOAA NCEI State Climate Extremes Committee records table and committee reports; NOAA (2010) for Vivian; NWS Honolulu (2012) for Hawaii.

Four of the 11 record stones fell in 2023 or later, and three of those four records rest on photographs or field measurements rather than the preserved stone:

• Texas. Storm chasers Val and Amy Castor found the Vigo Park stone beside a road in the southern Texas Panhandle and photographed it next to reference objects, but could not keep it. An AI-based estimate (7.06 in) and a photogrammetric one (7.16 in) led the committee to a best estimate of 7.1 inches. That beat the previous record, the 2021 stone from Hondo, which was about 6.4 inches.
• Oklahoma. The Ada stone was not kept either. The committee re-examined the 2011 Gotebo record alongside it and found the photographic evidence could not tell the two apart, so the record is a tie at 6.0 inches.
• Colorado. The Kirk stone had shrunk by the time the committee measured it, so the record rests on a caliper reading and photograph taken by the storm chaser who found it.
• Illinois. The Kankakee stone is the exception. It was frozen at once and laser-scanned.

The 2026 Illinois Record: 6.6 Inches, Not 6.1

The Illinois number in circulation depends on which stone you mean. On March 10, 2026, a long-lived supercell crossed the Kankakee River valley. That one storm produced a family of 12 tornadoes across Illinois and northwest Indiana and caused three deaths, and the day's storms left at least 126 severe hail reports in Illinois, more than 30 of them over 3 inches. Two families in Kankakee kept stones in their freezers:

• The first stone was measured with calipers at 156 mm (6.14 in). The National Weather Service storm report gives the same measurement, and the 6.1 inches in the DisasterAWARE archive comes from that report.
• The second stone was reported to Northern Illinois University (NIU) on March 12 by a second family, who had kept it in their garage freezer. On March 17, NIU and the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS) laser-scanned it: 6.603 inches on its longest axis, 19.65 ounces and 38.697 cubic inches.

The SCEC voted 4–0 in August 2026 to accept the second stone, and NCEI approved it on September 9, 2026. The official Illinois record is 6.603 inches (rounded to 6.6). It replaced a 4.75-inch stone that fell near Minooka on June 10, 2015.

The Biggest Hail in Every Other State

The other 40 states have no certified hailstone record. For some of them, a state climate office or an NWS office publishes the largest stone it knows of. We list those figures with their source, and say clearly that they are not certified.

Figures from a state climate office (not certified):

• Missouri: 6 in, near Meadville, Linn County, May 24, 2004 (16.5 in around), according to University of Missouri climatologist Pat Guinan (2008).
• Minnesota: about 6 in, near Chokio, Stevens County, July 31, 2024. The State Climatology Office calls it the largest documented in at least 38 years, but leaves open whether it beats 6-inch reports from 1968 and 1986.
• Wisconsin: 5.7 in, near Wausau, May 22, 1921. The State Climatology Office calls it the largest "officially verified" stone, without naming who verified it.
• North Carolina: 4.5 in, reported several times, most recently near Dysartsville on May 24, 2000, according to the NC State Climate Office. The SPC database adds a 4.5-inch report from April 2024.
• South Carolina: 4.5 in, Florence, May 25, 2000 (SC State Climatology Office). The SPC database adds four 4.5-inch reports from May 10, 2011.

Figures from an NWS office, based on storm reports since 1950 (not certified):

• Arkansas: 5 in, on January 21, 1999, April 2, 2006 and May 4, 2020 (NWS Little Rock). The SPC database has larger Arkansas entries from 1970 and 1972 that this list does not include.
• Mississippi: 5.0 in, Lafayette County, April 10, 1962 (NWS Jackson).
• Ohio: 5.0 in, Chillicothe, May 1, 2012 (NWS Charleston, WV).
• Virginia: 5 in, Lee County on April 23, 1968 and Loudoun County on July 2, 1968 (NWS Wakefield).
• Arizona: 4.5 in, near Mayer, September 28, 1995 (NWS Phoenix).
• Louisiana: 4.5 in, reported several times. NWS Shreveport calls this the state record.
• Maryland: 4.5 in, Baltimore County on June 18, 1970 and Charles County on April 28, 2002 (NWS Baltimore/Washington).
• West Virginia: 4.5 in, Welch, July 9, 1980 (NWS Charleston, WV).

No official or office figure: the largest report in the SPC database. For the remaining 27 states, the only number available is the largest entry in the Storm Prediction Center's hail database (1955–2025). These are storm reports. Nobody has verified them, and the old entries in particular are often questioned.

Source: NOAA Storm Prediction Center severe weather database, 1955–2025 hail file. * Equal to the certified US record, but never certified; both pre-date modern documentation. † The database's largest Indiana entry, 9.99 in (1961), is larger than the national record and undocumented, so it is not shown; the next largest is.

The gap between those entries and the certified records is the reason committees exist. Oklahoma's SPC maximum is an 8.0-inch report from 1971, but the certified record is 6.0 inches. Kansas' 1970 Coffeyville stone is in the database at 8.0 inches, yet the committee's Kansas diameter record is the 7.75-inch Wichita stone. A storm report is a first estimate made in the field. A record is a measured, documented and reviewed stone.

Map: Record Hailstones, and What Radar Saw

The map shows every official state-record stone (dark red), the three former records they replaced (gold), and the largest stones in the DisasterAWARE archive since 2017 (blue). What else it shows depends on the era:

• Since about October 2019, MRMS radar hail swaths exist. For the five record days since 2021 (Hondo, Kirk, Ada, Vigo Park and Kankakee), the orange shading is MESH, the radar's estimate of the maximum expected hail size over 24 hours. It is a model output, not a measured stone.
• Older record days have no swath. Instead, grey dots show every SPC hail report within 100 km of the record stone that day.

Open map full screen ↗ Hawaii's record stone (Kailua, Oahu) is off the default view: zoom out to see it.

Explore the map: switch on more layers with the layers icon at the bottom right of the map: NWS severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings (ALERT) around all 14 current and former record stones (2003–2026, from the Iowa Environmental Mesonet), with the lead time of each warning in force over a stone; NEXRAD radar reflectivity at the report times of the Vivian, Hondo, Vigo Park and Kankakee stones; the hail reports on the five MESH-era record days; and Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, where the Kankakee stone was laser-scanned.

Radar estimates run far below the record stones. On each of the five record days with radar data, the highest MESH value in the shaded box around the record stone was well short of the stone itself:

• Kankakee, 2026: MESH about 2.5 in; record stone 6.603 in.
• Vigo Park, 2024: MESH about 2.0 in; record stone 7.1 in.
• Ada, 2024: MESH about 2.9 in; record stone 6.0 in.
• Kirk, 2023: MESH about 3.9 in; record stone 5.25 in.
• Hondo, 2021: MESH about 3.8 in; record stone about 6.4 in.

MESH is very good at showing where damaging hail fell. It is not a stone measurement, and it should never be quoted as one.

In the DisasterAWARE Archive Since 2017

The DisasterAWARE historical hazard archive stores hail on its severe-thunderstorm and tornado records. Each record carries the National Weather Service storm reports, MRMS MESH swaths and warning hail tags for its area. Hail sizes start in 2015 and are continuous from 2017.

We pulled every US record with a hail size of 2 inches or more (4,434 records, queried October 9, 2026). The archive is alert-grain, so one storm can appear on several records. To count storms rather than records, we grouped the records into events:

1. Records on the same convective day (12 UTC to 12 UTC) whose points are within 50 km of each other form one event.
2. Events that share the same largest storm report are merged.
3. July 16, 2024 is excluded: hail sizes in New York and Pennsylvania that day come from a corrupt radar grid.

That left 17 storms with a stone of 5 inches or more. Every value below is OBSERVED, from a real-time NWS storm report. All but one were measured; the exception was estimated.

Source: DisasterAWARE Historical Hazards API, queried 2026-10-09. Dates are convective days (12 UTC to 12 UTC). Largest report = the largest NWS Local Storm Report on the storm's records.

Ten of the 17 are in Texas, but the largest is in Illinois, in March. Six of these storms produced official state-record stones (one of them, Bethune, since superseded). In four of the six the official stone was larger than the largest real-time report, by up to 1.1 inches at Vigo Park. At Kirk, the report's size field says 5.0 inches but its remark already gives the 5.25-inch record size; at Bethune the official stone was smaller. Hondo, in 2021, doesn't make the list at all: the archive's real-time report for that storm was 4.0 inches (estimated), and the stone later certified at about 6.4 inches was measured afterwards. The archive stores radar swaths at thresholds from 1.0 to 2.5 inches. The highest swath on any of the 17 is the 2.5-inch one, and the four storms before October 2019 have none.

For Insurers and Reinsurers: Why Record Stones Matter Less Than Swaths

Hail drives severe-storm losses. Swiss Re's sigma report on 2020 catastrophes found that about 50–80% of severe convective storm (SCS) losses come from hailstorms. Over the decade it reviewed, SCS caused more than half of the world's insured secondary-peril losses. In North America, insured SCS losses for 2011–2020 exceeded those from all primary perils combined. Record stones get the headlines, but the loss depends on how much damaging hail falls over homes, vehicles and roofs, not on the single biggest stone.

One day, more than a hundred reports. March 10, 2026 is the template: one supercell produced a 6.6-inch record stone and a dozen tornadoes across two states, and the day's storms left at least 126 severe hail reports in Illinois, more than 30 of them over 3 inches. To underwrite or settle that event, you need its footprint, not its record.

Three things this list teaches about hail data:

• First reports are not final. Real-time NWS reports came in both below and above the certified stones: 4.0 vs about 6.4 inches at Hondo, 6.0 vs 7.1 at Vigo Park, 5.25 vs 6.0 at Ada, but 5.0 vs 4.83 at Bethune. Claims triage built on a single report value inherits that error.
• Radar estimates are not stones. On the five record days, the MESH maximum in the box around each record stone was 2.0–3.9 inches, against stones of 5.25–7.1 inches. At Kirk and Hondo that maximum lay 36 and 47 km from the stone; within 25 km of them, MESH peaked at about 1.8 and 2.9 inches. MESH is the right tool for footprint and exposure. It is the wrong tool for "how big was the biggest stone".
• Storms span many records. In our archive the March 10, 2026 storm sits on 9 alert records, and in a raw ranking of records it holds the top three places outright, with two more of its records among the eleven tied for sixth. Without event-level de-duplication, one storm can fill a "top 10".

The data question. DisasterAWARE's severe convective storm data keeps every one of these layers on the event record, with its tier: measured and estimated storm reports, warning hail tags (ALERT), and MRMS MESH swath polygons at 1.0 to 2.5 inches (MODELED). That is what you need to rebuild a hail day across a portfolio, test a parametric hail trigger against what actually fell, or explain why a claim cluster sits outside the radar swath. Historical Event Intelligence licenses the archive, and the sample datasets show the record format with no signup.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the largest hailstone ever recorded in the US? The Vivian, South Dakota, hailstone of July 23, 2010: 8.0 inches in diameter, 18.62 inches in circumference and 1.9375 pounds. NOAA's National Climate Extremes Committee certified it as the US record for both diameter and weight. NOAA named the Aurora, Nebraska, stone of June 22, 2003 (18.75 inches) the circumference record in 2010, but NCEI's table now lists a larger circumference for the 2021 Hondo, Texas stone (19.73 inches).

What is the largest hailstone ever recorded in the world? The World Meteorological Organization keeps a record for weight only: 1.02 kg (2.25 lb), in Gopalganj district, Bangladesh, on April 14, 1986. Vivian (0.88 kg) is the WMO record for the Western Hemisphere. No official world record exists for diameter. Photographs from Argentina on February 8, 2018 suggest stones of up to about 20 cm (nearly 8 inches), but those are estimates, not a certified record.

What is the largest hailstone ever recorded in Illinois? 6.603 inches, at Kankakee on March 10, 2026, certified by the State Climate Extremes Committee and approved by NCEI on September 9, 2026. A smaller stone from the same storm, measured at 6.14 inches, was the one in the first National Weather Service report, which is why figures of 6.1 inches also circulate. The previous record was 4.75 inches, near Minooka on June 10, 2015.

What is the largest hailstone ever recorded in Texas? 7.1 inches, about 3 miles west-northwest of Vigo Park in Swisher County, on June 2, 2024. It was measured from photographs and certified in June 2026. It replaced the 2021 Hondo stone, about 6.4 inches.

Does every state have an official hailstone record? No. Only nine states have a hail record in NOAA NCEI's State Climate Extremes Committee table (South Dakota, Kansas, Texas, Nebraska, Illinois, Oklahoma, Alabama, Colorado and Vermont), plus Hawaii, whose 2012 record was confirmed by NWS Honolulu with the committee. For most other states, the "record" you see quoted is the largest storm report in the SPC database, which nobody has verified.

Related Reading

• Severe Convective Storm Data: Hail, Wind and Tornado Records
• Worst Hail Storms in US History: The Costliest
• March 2026 Tornado Outbreak
• EF5 Tornadoes: The Complete List
• Secondary Perils and Insurance Risk

Sources: NOAA NCEI State Climate Extremes Committee records table and committee reports (Illinois 2026, Texas 2026 and 2021, Oklahoma 2026 and 2011, Colorado 2023, Alabama 2018); NOAA press release on the Vivian hailstone (July 30, 2010) and NWS Aberdeen; NWS Honolulu (Hawaii, 2012); University of Missouri (Pat Guinan, 2008); Minnesota State Climatology Office; Wisconsin State Climatology Office; NC State Climate Office; SC State Climatology Office; NWS offices in Little Rock, Jackson, Charleston WV, Wakefield, Phoenix, Shreveport and Baltimore/Washington; NOAA Storm Prediction Center severe weather database (1955–2025 hail); NOAA MRMS MESH via the Iowa Environmental Mesonet archive; WMO World Weather and Climate Extremes Archive; Swiss Re Institute, sigma No 1/2021; DisasterAWARE Historical Hazards API (queried 2026-10-09).