The Average Is the Least Useful Number on Your Snow Quote

August 22, 2026 · JRW Services LLC

Everybody quoting your property this month is working from an average. Ours included. The trouble is that nobody has ever experienced an average winter, and the numbers underneath prove it.

We publish the full record for the five counties we cover, pulled from NOAA weather station data, on our snowfall history page. Here is the part that should change how you read a quote.

What the record actually says

Read the Morris row again. The same county has recorded a winter with no measurable seasonal snowfall and a winter with more than seven feet of it. Bergen has run from under three inches to over six feet. Sussex, on sixty seasons of record, has done both zero and ninety-five.

The average sits in the middle of that and describes almost none of it.

The spread is what you are buying

Snow has to get moved whatever the winter does. The only real question in a contract is who carries the difference between a light year and a heavy one.

• Seasonal flat rate. The contractor carries it. You know your number in September and it does not move, in either direction.
• Per event. You carry it. A quiet winter is cheap, and a 1995-96 costs what 1995-96 costs.
• Per inch, tiered. You split it, band by band, and you take on the job of verifying measurement.

None of those is wrong. But notice that the argument for each one is really an argument about the spread in the table above, not about the average. If your county's record runs from 2.7 inches to 78.4, deciding based on a 30-inch average is deciding based on a number that has essentially never happened.

The honest case against us

We sell seasonal contracts, so here is the counter-argument stated properly: there are real winters in that table where a per-event contract would have been the cheaper choice by a wide margin. Morris in 2004-05. Sussex in 1957-58. Passaic in 2008-09 at a single inch. If you had bet on a mild winter in those years you would have won.

The reason most property managers still take the flat rate is not that it always costs less. It is that a budget line that cannot move is worth something on its own, and that the year it saves you is the year everything else has already gone wrong.

The bit nobody mentions: bad winters are bad everywhere

Look at the heaviest column. 1995-96 is the record season in four of the five counties.

That matters more than it looks, because it tells you the risk is correlated. When a winter is brutal in Bergen it is usually brutal in Morris and Passaic too, which means every contractor in the region is stretched in the same week. A contractor whose plan for a heavy winter is "we will find more trucks" is planning to go shopping in the exact market where nobody has any.

That is why we keep partnerships with vetted New Jersey contractors and stage salt across all five counties before the season starts, and why we would rather tell you that in August than in February.

What to ask, given all this

• What does the record actually look like for my county, not the state?
• If this winter is a 1995-96, what is your plan, and does it depend on equipment you do not currently control?
• Which of us is carrying the variance under this structure, and is that what I intended?
• What is the trigger depth, and what happens on the cleanup passes after the storm?

We walk through the three pricing structures in more detail in seasonal vs per-event snow contracts, and the full station-by-station record is on the snowfall history page, including which NOAA station each county's numbers come from.

Sources

All figures above come from NOAA GHCN-Daily station records for the named stations, summed by season from July through June, with seasons carrying substantial missing observations excluded. The station for each county, the number of recorded seasons and the methodology are published in full on our snowfall history page. Data retrieved July 2026.

Keep reading

• Zero Tolerance or Inch Trigger? Pick the Right Snow Service Level
• Seasonal vs. Per-Event Snow Contracts: Which Fits Your Property?
• An HOA Board's Guide to Reviewing the Snow Contract