Weather Delay Days in Kansas City, MO
A 2016-2025 NOAA station baseline for Kansas City, MO, scored against Silt soil. January is the worst month at roughly 11 unworkable workdays for earthwork, grading and foundation work; the full monthly baseline is below. Enclosed and vertical work is not modelled.
Month by month
Typical is the ten-year mean — the figure to carry in a bid or schedule. Median is the middle year of the ten; where it exceeds the mean, the baseline is skewed by unusually dry years. Abnormal above is the mean plus one standard deviation, past which a month sits outside its normal range and is the stronger basis for a claim.
| Month | Avg rainfall | Typical lost workdays | Median | Abnormal above |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | 1.02″ | 11 | 10 | 14 |
| February | 0.50″ | 8 | 9 | 13 |
| March | 2.14″ | 8 | 8 | 11 |
| April | 2.73″ | 6 | 6 | 9 |
| May | 5.37″ | 11 | 10 | 16 |
| June | 3.56″ | 5 | 6 | 8 |
| July | 4.68″ | 9 | 10 | 13 |
| August | 4.12″ | 6 | 5 | 11 |
| September | 2.14″ | 4 | 5 | 7 |
| October | 2.52″ | 7 | 7 | 10 |
| November | 1.44″ | 5 | 6 | 9 |
| December | 0.89″ | 7 | 8 | 10 |
What these numbers mean
A workday counts as lost when precipitation exceeded 0.1″, or the ground had not finished drying from an earlier rain, or the ground was frozen. Only Monday to Friday is counted. Days the station did not report are excluded from the count entirely rather than assumed workable — understating a contractor’s exposure is the one direction of error a delay figure must never make.
Read these month by month, not added up. Each row is an independent baseline for a site in the condition it is in that month. Summing twelve of them would assume a jobsite never improves — no stone haul roads, no stabilised pads, no ditching — which is wrong for any real project past its first few months. Over a single month, or over the two-to-four week window a delay claim actually covers, that effect is negligible and these figures hold. Over a year it is not, so no annual total is published here.
On silt soil this model charges an average of 1.64 drying days per rain day in Kansas City, MO. That is the figure worth checking against your own experience: if it is wrong for your sites, every number on this page moves with it.
Why Silt soil matters here
Rainfall totals alone understate an earthwork schedule, because the ground stays untrafficable after the rain stops. The drying clock for Kansas City, MO is seeded at Silt, 2.0 base drying day(s), then adjusted for the day’s temperature, rainfall intensity, and how wet the ground already was over the preceding five days.
The same month of rain costs a sand site almost nothing and a clay site a week. That is why two contractors in the same county can honestly disagree about how many weather days a job should carry.
Year by year: January
An average hides the spread, and the spread is what a claim turns on. Lost workdays in January for each year of the baseline:
| Year | Lost workdays |
|---|---|
| 2016 | 10 |
| 2017 | 8 |
| 2018 | 12 |
| 2019 | 14 — above the abnormal threshold |
| 2020 | 7 |
| 2021 | 10 |
| 2022 | 10 |
| 2023 | 10 |
| 2024 | 15 — above the abnormal threshold |
| 2025 | 16 — above the abnormal threshold |
Nearby metros
Soil changes faster than weather does. These are the closest markets we track — note how the worst month can differ even where the rainfall barely does.
| Metro | Distance | Soil | Worst month | Lost workdays |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| St. Louis, MO | 238 mi | Silt | January | 13 |
| Oklahoma City, OK | 298 mi | Clay | May | 12 |
| Memphis, TN | 369 mi | Silt | January | 14 |
| Minneapolis, MN | 411 mi | Silt | January | 20 |
| Chicago, IL | 412 mi | Clay | January | 19 |
Download this data
The full baseline for Kansas City, MO — every month, every individual year, with the station and soil basis attached — is available as JSON under a CC BY 4.0 licence. Use it, cite it.
Data source
Observations from the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Global Historical Climatology Network – Daily (GHCND) — U.S. Government public-domain station records. Baseline 2016-2025, 3621 observed days. Algorithm v2.3.0, generated August 23, 2026.
Citing this page
Published under CC BY 4.0. Free to quote, republish or build on, including commercially, provided the attribution below travels with it.
Ilystics LLC. Construction weather delay days — Kansas City, MO (2016–2025). Ilystics Weather Delay Index, v2.3.0. Retrieved from https://ilystics.com/weather-delay-days/kansas-city-mo
Need this for your actual jobsite?
A metro average is a planning figure. Enter your ZIP and dates and the estimator runs the same model against the station nearest your site, on your soil, and returns a contract-ready exhibit. Free, no account.
Run it for your ZIPThese figures model soil-dependent site work — earthwork, grading, excavation, foundations and underground utilities. Enclosed and vertical work is not modelled. They are planning figures derived from station observations and a deterministic soil model, not site-specific geotechnical findings, and they do not establish contractual entitlement, causation or damages.