Every time you step outside, you pick up two or three bites. You’re swatting miniature pests left and right, and it seems like something is always buzzing in your ear.
No, you’re not crazy. The mosquitoes in Phoenix have been fucking awful this year.
The amount of mosquitos that I have experienced in Phoenix this past month feels like something out of Exodus
— uncanny valley girl (@girloftheminute) November 4, 2025
Mosquito complaints made to the Maricopa County Vector Control Division, which monitors and deals with mosquito populations, have increased 400% compared to a year ago. In 2024, the county received about 1,500 complaints, division manager John Townsend told Phoenix New Times. This year, complaints have skyrocketed to 6,000 — so far.
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Townsend also said that while the Valley has typical mosquito complaint hotspots — particularly in the East Valley — complaints have come from all over the county this year. Vector Control sets traps to monitor mosquito activity at 850 sites across the Phoenix metro area and is finding a lot of mosquitoes where they usually are not.
“Typically, in the southeast Valley — Queen Creek, Chandler, Gilbert and Mesa, and areas with flood irrigation — we get a lot of mosquitoes and complaints because they’re irrigating their property every two weeks,” Townsend said. “This past month, it’s been more widespread. We have a lot of areas collecting water that normally don’t.”
The mosquito problem in Phoenix hasn’t been this bad in nearly a decade, he said. “The last time it was close to this activity was eight or nine years ago,” Townsend said, “when, later in the year, three different hurricanes came up from Mexico.”
If you’re thinking, “Huh, we’ve had a lot of rain this year, too” — congrats, you’re on your way to earning a mosquito PhD. Phoenix’s mosquito situation was remarkably worse than usual this October because of all the rain the Valley got at the end of September.
Those storms left standing water that settled all over the Valley, creating a perfect egg-laying environment for mosquitoes. The warm (but not excessively hot) temperatures in late October provided ideal conditions for those pesky buggers to thrive.
Several different species of mosquito live in the Valley.
Meet the mosquitoes
One type of mosquito has thrived more than others.
More water in unusual places, like buckets or empty pots, means that floodwater mosquito populations have popped off. Thankfully, floodwater mosquitoes bite during the day and don’t carry diseases as much as other species in the Valley. These annoying, smaller insects are what experts consider to be a “nuisance mosquito,” Townsend said, ready to “ruin your picnic or barbeque” but not your health.
But not all mosquitoes are created equal. Kelsey Lyberger, a mosquito ecology researcher at Arizona State University, said that the mosquito explosion has been diverse.
“Interestingly, it wasn’t just a single species,” Lyberger said. “We’re seeing a whole bunch of species, like floodwater species to Yellow Fever-carrying mosquitoes (Aedes aegypti), to a couple of Culex species, which transmit West Nile Virus.”
Those species, unlike the floodwater mosquitoes, tend to live in and around more permanent bodies of water. Their activity has also increased substantially. The Valley has seen 46 cases of West Nile Virus this year, more than double the figure last year. In addition, one person tested positive last week for St. Louis Encephalitis, another disease carried by Culex mosquitoes.
However, Lyberger isn’t too worried about the ongoing threat of those viruses.
“It’s late enough in the season that we don’t expect West Nile to be a big threat anymore,” she said. “Once those temperatures cool, those populations are going to drop off very quickly.”
The same pattern is expected with floodwater mosquitoes.
“Hopefully, as the weather cools down, this floodwater mosquito activity will start to subside,” Townsend said. “We’re still seeing some in our traps, but not anything like what we were seeing a month ago.”
A swarm of mosquitoes.
Almost over?
There’s a complicating factor, though: rainstorms are expected to grip the Phoenix metro area intermittently from Saturday until the following weekend.
Mosquito survival — our human sanity — may depend on whether the moisture or the lower temperatures have a bigger effect on the bugs. The rain could lead to another wave of heightened mosquito activity, or the cooler temperatures could bring a drop.
“I still think temperature is going to win out,” Lyberger said. “There might be a nice habitat, but I don’t expect to see any huge numbers in the following few weeks.”
Even when temperatures drop for winter, the current mosquito problem could come roaring back next spring. As both experts noted, mosquitoes can lay eggs that lay dormant for months — or, in some cases, a year.
“If it’s a relatively mild winter, I do think you’d see boosted spring populations,” Lyberger said. “But if it’s a cold winter and they die out, I would go back to baseline prediction.”
If you want to prevent another mosquito-pocalypse, Townsend has an easy tip to stop floodwater mosquito populations from running wild in your space.
“After a rain, do yourself a favor and turn anything over in your backyard that’s holding water,” he said. “You’ll do yourself a favor by not having these mosquitoes bugging you all the time.”