Samplize American Paint Color Report 2026
Regional follow-upThe Paint Color Map of America
The American Paint Color Report found the country warming up. A state-by-state look shows where it started warm, where cool colors hold strongest — and that every state moved the same direction.
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Samplize, a Material Bank company, helps homeowners and designers find the right paint color before committing to a can. Our peel-and-stick samples—featuring BEHR, Benjamin Moore, Farrow & Ball, and Sherwin-Williams—ship straight to your door for true-to-color, mess-free testing.
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78%
of everything tested in Arizona is a warm tone — the warmest palette in the country.
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43%
of Massachusetts and Connecticut shortlists include a blue compared to Arizona's 24%.
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41%
of shortlists in Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee include a green — the greenest part of the country.
The Map
Warm share, state by state
Share of everything tested that is a warm tone, H1 2026. Hover or tap a state; lines mark the four Census regions. Named states had enough data in the 2026 window; the rest count toward every regional and division figure.
64%78%
Included in regional data
Census region boundary
When the Samplize American Paint Color Report came out in September, its headline finding was national: warm tones now account for nearly 70% of everything Americans test, and half of all shortlists contain no cool color at all. That raised an obvious next question: Is the whole country warming up together, or is the national average a blend of very different places?
Both, it turns out. The starting points are local. The direction isn't.
This piece looks at the same three years of shortlists — the colors people ordered as peel-and-stick samples before deciding — broken out by the state each order shipped to, across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. To keep the geography consistent, it uses the U.S. Census Bureau's four regions and nine divisions, spelled out at the end.
Finding 1
A 14-point spread, and blue marks the line
The gap between the warmest and coolest states is fourteen points, and it follows a line you could draw from memory.
Arizona has the warmest palette in the country. Seventy-eight percent of everything tested there is a warm tone, and 64% of Arizona shortlists contain no cool color at all — nearly two in three. Utah, Colorado and California's warm shares are all above 73%. Taken as a group, the Mountain division — Arizona, Colorado, Utah and their neighbors — is the warmest of the nine Census divisions, at 75.3%. The warm whites are doing much of the work: Benjamin Moore's Swiss Coffee and Sherwin-Williams' Alabaster each grew by more than half across the Mountain states over the period.
Blue colors hold strongest in New England. Massachusetts and Connecticut sit at 64% warm; the division as a whole is at 64.7%, the lowest in the country. North Carolina, Washington DC and Virginia, in the South Atlantic division, are within two points of them. In all of those states, fewer than half of shortlists are all-warm.
The clearest single expression of the divide is blue. In Massachusetts and Connecticut, a blue appears in 43% of shortlists. In Arizona, 24%. By division, it's New England at 42% against the Mountain states at 28%. Benjamin Moore's Palladian Blue, Farrow & Ball's Borrowed Light and Sherwin-Williams' Tradewind were each up by roughly three-quarters or more across New England.
Warm share by Census division
H1 2024 → H1 2026
Mountain
75.3%
Pacific
72.7%
West North Central
71.7%
East South Central
70.6%
East North Central
70.6%
West South Central
69.6%
Middle Atlantic
68.8%
South Atlantic
66.6%
New England
64.7%
Finding 2
Every color family has a home base
Earth tones belong to the interior
The Mountain division leads the country: one in five shortlists there includes an earth tone (20.5%). The West South Central and West North Central divisions follow at about 17%. The Pacific coast sits in the middle at 15%; California alone is at 14%. New England (8%) and the Middle Atlantic (10%) are the lowest.
State by state, the same picture: Kansas leads at 22%, with Colorado, Utah and Arizona all around one in five. Across the Northeast it's under one in ten — New York 9%, Connecticut 8.5%, New Jersey 8%, Massachusetts 7.5%. The color family the American Paint Color Report called the fastest-rising in the country is being led from the Mountain and Plains states, not from either coast — though it's growing everywhere, including a rise of nearly half, in relative terms, in New England. The color carrying the most of that growth in the Mountain states is Sherwin-Williams' Urbane Bronze, which more than doubled there.
Share of shortlists with an earth tone, 2024 → 2026
Mountain
15.0 → 20.5
West South Central
11.7 → 17.3
West North Central
12.0 → 17.0
East South Central
12.3 → 16.7
Pacific
10.7 → 14.8
East North Central
10.2 → 14.8
South Atlantic
8.6 → 12.2
Middle Atlantic
6.6 → 9.8
New England
5.5 → 8.0
The greenest part of the country
The greenest part of the country is the East South Central division — Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee — where 41% of shortlists include a green, followed by the West South Central states at 39%. In those four East South Central states, Benjamin Moore's Saybrook Sage, Farrow & Ball's Pigeon and Sherwin-Williams' Evergreen Fog each grew by more than two-thirds. Florida, in the South Atlantic division, is the exception to its own neighborhood: green shows up in 28% of Florida shortlists, against 42% across the state line in Alabama.
- Alabama42%of shortlists include a green
- Florida28%of shortlists include a green
Finding 3
Same direction, different starting lines
Here is the part that matters most for anyone reading the map.
Every one of the 50 states and DC warmed between 2024 and 2026. Not most. All of them. The four Census regions moved by almost the same amount — the Northeast by 5.8 points, the West by 5.3, the Midwest by 5.0, the South by 4.6 — and the share of shortlists with no cool color rose in every one of them.
So the West didn't pull away and the Northeast didn't catch up. At the regional level the gap between them is essentially what it was two years ago; the whole map slid warmer together. Within regions, individual states moved at different speeds — Washington DC, Virginia and New York each gained more than seven points, and in those three, Benjamin Moore's Pale Oak more than doubled — but not one state moved the other way.
That's the picture in one sentence: the warming is national, and the starting point is local. Arizona and Massachusetts are fourteen points apart and heading the same direction at about the same speed.
Census regions, warm share
West–Northeast gap: 6.8 points in 2024, 6.3 in 2026
West
68.2% → 73.6% (+5.3)
Midwest
65.9% → 71.0% (+5.0)
South
63.4% → 67.9% (+4.6)
Northeast
61.4% → 67.3% (+5.8)
Fastest-warming named states
Change in warm share, H1 2024 → H1 2026
- +9.2 Washington DCto 65.6% warm
- +7.5 Virginiato 66.0% warm
- +7.2 New Yorkto 70.0% warm
Methodology
Based on Samplize peel-and-stick paint samples ordered in the U.S. in the first half of 2024 and 2026 (January–June each year), the same matched window used in the American Paint Color Report. Every order is assigned to a state by its shipping ZIP code; the data covers all 50 states and the District of Columbia. States are named individually only where 2026 order volume was large enough to report reliably; all other states are included in every regional and division figure. Regions and divisions follow the U.S. Census Bureau's definitions. Warm and cool classifications and color families are the manufacturers' own published color data. "Share of shortlists" is the share of orders containing at least one color from that family. All figures are percentages, percentage-point changes or percentage growth; underlying volumes are not published.
| Region | Division | States |
|---|---|---|
| Northeast | New England | CT, ME, MA, NH, RI, VT |
| Northeast | Middle Atlantic | NJ, NY, PA |
| Midwest | East North Central | IL, IN, MI, OH, WI |
| Midwest | West North Central | IA, KS, MN, MO, NE, ND, SD |
| South | South Atlantic | DE, DC, FL, GA, MD, NC, SC, VA, WV |
| South | East South Central | AL, KY, MS, TN |
| South | West South Central | AR, LA, OK, TX |
| West | Mountain | AZ, CO, ID, MT, NV, NM, UT, WY |
| West | Pacific | AK, CA, HI, OR, WA |
For Media
Everything you need to cover this story
The Paint Color Map of AmericaFull report · PDF · 4 pages Opens in a new window.
Official press releasePDF · ready to run Opens in a new window.
Report DataCSV Opens in a new window.
Media contact
Makenna Lutz
prteam@samplize.comInterview requests, embargoed data, and custom cuts of the analysis available on request.