Which DWTS dance styles score highest?
Freestyle leads absolute means (9.62); cha-cha-cha lowest among volume styles (7.04); paso (8.10) beats foxtrot (7.54).
Ballroom Data · Artometrics-style report · Nov 3, 2026 (America/Los_Angeles)
Headline
Freestyle leads all styles with a 9.62/10 mean judge score (n=101) — but freestyles mostly land in finals. Among regularly danced ballroom styles, the paso doble (8.10, n=241) outscores the foxtrot (7.54, n=337), while the cha-cha-cha sits at the bottom of the pack at 7.04 across 360 dances.
Why it matters
Fans argue endlessly about which dances are “hard.” The judges’ card is a noisy but consistent signal across 35 seasons once you normalize to a per-judge mean.
Findings
- Late-show styles dominate the absolute leaderboard. Freestyle (9.62), Contemporary (8.78), and Argentine tango (8.72) top the chart — all skewed toward later weeks when weaker couples are gone.
- Among classic styles, paso and Viennese waltz score high; cha-cha scores low. Paso doble mean 8.10; Viennese waltz 8.11; cha-cha-cha 7.04; foxtrot 7.54.
- 17 styles clear a minimum of 20 scored performances after dropping marathons and relays.
Top styles (min n=20)
| Style | Mean | Median | n |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freestyle | 9.625 | 10.000 | 101 |
| Contemporary | 8.781 | 9.000 | 117 |
| Argentine tango | 8.723 | 9.000 | 147 |
| Charleston | 8.593 | 8.667 | 36 |
| Jazz | 8.324 | 8.333 | 120 |
| Viennese waltz | 8.106 | 8.000 | 231 |
| Paso doble | 8.103 | 8.250 | 241 |
| Samba | 8.053 | 8.292 | 232 |
Lowest classic-volume styles
| Style | Mean | n |
|---|---|---|
| Jive | 7.804 | 282 |
| Tango | 7.791 | 238 |
| Foxtrot | 7.539 | 337 |
| Salsa | 7.490 | 160 |
| Cha-cha-cha | 7.035 | 360 |
Methods & caveats
Primary chart uses mean of individual judge marks per performance. Styles with marathon/relay/megamix in the name are excluded. Minimum n=20 scored dances.
Coverage: seasons 1–35; 3,602 performances; 11,027 individual judge marks in the cleaned Ballroom Data SQLite build (Nov 3, 2026, America/Los_Angeles).
Known gaps: Season 31 Mirrorball winner is not tagged as Winners in the performance table (Charli D’Amelio / Mark Ballas is missing from our winners extract). Seasons 33–35 largely lack Kaggle ages/hometowns. Season 35 celebrity names in the wiki scrape are often first-name-only or garbled. Dance-style strings still include some unclean variants. We never impute missing values.
Sources: howisonlab/dwts_dataset (GitHub); Kaggle brupley/dancing-with-the-stars-dataset (CC BY-SA 4.0); Wikipedia DWTS season pages for seasons 32–35 (CC BY-SA 4.0). Scores are per-judge means on a 0–10 scale so 3-judge and 4-judge weeks are comparable. Marathons/relays/megamixes are excluded from style averages unless noted.
Disclaimer: Unofficial fan analysis. Not affiliated with BBC Worldwide, Disney, or ABC.
Downloads
Quarto source, rendered report, chart exports (PNG/SVG), and the analysis CSV.
