We investigated regional changes in winter storm surges along the North Atlantic coasts, over the last century. We analyzed 35 tide gauges, with at least 80 years of data. We conducted a Generalized Extreme Value analysis on a 21-yr sliding window, to investigate variations in the 10-yr surge return level. Thanks to a standard clustering algorithm, we identified four regions with similar storm surge variations: the Northern Europe, the Northern U.S., the New York Bight and the Southern U.S.. The Northern Europe appears to be quite homogeneous, despite some discrepancies between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. Surprisingly, storm surge variations in the New York Bight are close to the ones of the Northern Europe, suggesting connections across the North Atlantic. On the contrary, the New York Bight shows very different variations from the Northern U.S., despite located inside this coherent region. Large geographical areas with similar changes show that observed changes are mainly driven by large-scale processes. Close variations between storm surges and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation suggest that the North Atlantic sea surface temperature may play a role. In addition, we found that 6% of tide gauges display different variations from any tide gauge around, despite located in a coherent region, which suggests predominant local effects (e.g. freshwater inflow or harbour development). These isolated stations should be considered carefully, particularly when reconstructing spatially the storm surges, as they may not be representative of regional dynamics, but rather local dynamics.