Abstract. In a context of climate change, trends in extreme snow loads need to be determined to minimize the risk of structure collapse.We study trends in annual maxima of ground snow load (GSL) using non-stationary extreme value models. Trends in return levels of GSL are assessed at a mountain massif scale from GSL data, provided for the French Alps from 1959 to 2019 by a meteorological reanalysis and a snowpack model. Our results indicate a temporal decrease in 50-year return levels from 900 m to 4200 m, significant in the Northwest of the French Alps until 2100 m. Despite this decrease, in half of the massifs, the return level in 2019 at 1800 m exceeds the return level designed for French building standards under a stationary assumption. We believe that this high number of exceedances is due to questionable assumptions concerning the computation of current standards. For example, these were devised with GSL, estimated from snow depth and constant snow density set to 150 kg m−3, which underestimate typical GSL values for the full snowpack.