Great Falls Epoxy Flooring by the Numbers

Last reviewed 2026-07-25. Journalists, researchers, and community groups are welcome to cite any figure on this page with attribution and a link.

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.

The Freeze-Thaw Ledger

The National Weather Service's annual climate accounting for Great Falls International Airport puts the winter in plain columns. A normal year runs 166 days with a minimum temperature at or below 32 degrees and 21 days at or below zero, against a normal January average of 26.2 degrees and a normal annual snowfall of 66.1 inches. The 2021 report shows how wide the envelope actually swings: that single year bottomed at 33 below zero in February and touched 99 degrees twice in summer, a 132-degree annual span recorded at one airport thermometer.

For concrete, the load-bearing number is 166. That is not four months of continuous freeze; it is the freezing line crossed over and over from October to April, and every crossing that follows a melt runs the soak-and-freeze cycle inside any bare slab holding water. It is the statistical spine of every pitted tire lane in town, and the working reason coated, sealed floors are a structural decision here rather than a cosmetic one.

Chinook Whiplash, Measured

The chinook records around Great Falls read like typographical errors and are not. At Loma, down the Missouri near Fort Benton, a January 1972 chinook drove the temperature from 54 below zero to 49 above in 24 hours, a 103-degree swing that stands as the largest one-day temperature change in United States weather records. Cut Bank, up the Rocky Mountain Front, has gained roughly 30 degrees in a single hour, and chinook winds along the Front have been clocked above 100 miles per hour. Great Falls sits squarely in this pattern, arch cloud and all, which is why local winters cross freezing constantly instead of once.

Wind is the pattern's fingerprint in the ordinary data too: the 2021 NWS report logs an annual average wind speed of 11.6 miles per hour for Great Falls with a peak gust of 76, and the same report's 170 freezing-low days that year land within a few of the long-term normal. The coating-trade translation of all this is the slab-lag rule. Air that jumps 40 degrees in an afternoon leaves the concrete a day or more behind, so install decisions here get made with a surface thermometer on the slab rather than a glance at the forecast.

The Housing Stock Being Coated

Census QuickFacts sizes the residential market this site serves. Great Falls held an estimated 60,208 people as of July 2025, essentially flat since 2020, across 23 square miles of land at about 2,628 people per square mile. The ownership numbers are what matter for coating work: 66.1 percent of occupied units sit in owner hands over 2020-2024. Median owner-occupied home value: $257,000. Median household income: $63,373 in 2024 dollars. Median gross rent: $900.

Read together, those figures describe a compact, majority-owner town where the housing dollar still buys a detached house with a garage and, very often, a full basement, exactly the two concrete surfaces coatings serve best. A high ownership rate means improvement decisions get made by the people who will live with the floor through the next dozen winters, and the value math is friendly: a coating system priced in the low thousands sits against a median home value of a quarter million dollars, protecting the slab that everything else in the garage stands on.

The Working Economy Behind the Shop Floors

Malmstrom Air Force Base anchors the east side of town, and its official fact sheet gives the scale: approximately 4,000 people, more than 3,300 active-duty and about 600 civilians, operating and maintaining the 341st Missile Wing's Minuteman III force across a 13,800-square-mile missile complex spread over nine counties, historically counted among the largest such complexes in the world. That geography matters to floors in a specific way, since the vehicles, contractors and support trades that ride those field roads all park, wrench and stage out of shops in and around Great Falls.

The other half of the working economy is agricultural, the wheat and barley country that surrounds the city, and its floors are the ag shops, fabrication bays and equipment sheds this site's industrial pages are written for. The climate data closes the loop on serving them: with normal annual precipitation of just 14.76 inches, Great Falls installs enjoy dry, predictable cure conditions through a warm season that 2021 shows can also spike to 99 degrees, which is why local install craft is a matter of managed windows, morning pours and slab thermometers rather than luck.

Sources & Methodology

Every figure above was taken from the primary sources below (accessed 2026-07-25). Where a number is derived (arithmetic on published figures) or covers a broader period or area, the text says so.

1. U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts: Great Falls city, Montana
2. NWS Great Falls, annual climate report for Great Falls International Airport (2021 report: normals, extremes, wind)
3. weather.com: Chinook winds drive rapid Montana temperature rises (Loma 1972 record, Cut Bank 2020 event)
4. KTVH Weather Wise: Chinook Winds (formation, Front wind speeds, Great Falls arch clouds)
5. U.S. Air Force fact sheet: 341st Missile Wing, Malmstrom AFB