We study Nevai's condition from the theory of orthogonal polynomials on the real line. We prove that a large class of measures with unbounded Jacobi parameters satisfies Nevai's condition locally uniformly on the support of the measure away from a finite explicit set. This allows us to give applications to relative uniform and weak asymptotics of Christoffel-Darboux kernels on the diagonal and to limit theorems for unconventionally normalized global linear statistics of orthogonal polynomial ensembles.