Stream drying is impacting aquatic communities in every part of the globe, but its impacts are most studied in arid regions, where drying is widespread and occurs regularly. However, climate change is altering stream drying patterns globally, so it is essential to understand how intensifying drying events may affect aquatic communities across climate zones. In this study, we quantified stream drying and aquatic invertebrate communities in 10 stream basins spanning the southern half of the continental USA, from the arid Southwest to the humid Southeast, over a three-year period. Our spatially replicated study design included 10 sampling reaches nested within each of the 10 basins, to capture both perennial and intermittent sites within each basin. Surprisingly, neither gamma diversity of aquatic invertebrates by basin nor average reach-scale taxon richness varied predictably with increasing climatic aridity. However, within basins, average taxon richness per sample tended to be lower in intermittent versus perennial reaches. Additionally, the magnitude of the increase of taxon richness in perennial versus intermittent reaches tended to be larger in arid basins. In the most humid basins, we found no differences in taxon richness between intermittent and perennial reaches. Invertebrate community composition did vary along the continental gradient, but compositional differences between intermittent and perennial reaches were highly variable and basin-specific. Our results suggest that the loss of perennial flow due to climate change may have larger impacts on aquatic invertebrates in more arid basins, where a number of taxa are already restricted to small and isolated perennial reaches. The persistence of at least some nearby perennial refuges may buffer the local impacts of stream drying on aquatic invertebrates in humid basins.