When the frosts come, station by station

This is a guide, not a guarantee. Each figure describes what happened at one weather station between 1996 and 2025. Your garden may sit in a frost pocket or against a warm wall, and a single late night can undo any average, so don't plant out tender things on the average date alone.

When is the last frost in the UK? Last frost dates by region

Stations are grouped by region. The averages are the middle of the spread, not the all-clear: the "latest" and "earliest" columns show the furthest the frost reached in either direction over the 30 years.

Some stations went through whole half-years with no air frost at all, and those years are left out of that station's average rather than counted as a date: Stornoway Airport (2 autumns); Sheffield (1 autumn); Heathrow (1 autumn); Camborne (6 springs, 13 autumns); Plymouth Mountbatten (1 spring, 3 autumns); North Wyke (1 spring, 1 autumn); Valley (4 autumns); Aberporth (2 springs, 5 autumns); Cardiff Bute Park (1 autumn).

Last and first frost dates for your own garden

Pick the station most like your garden, not simply the nearest: a coastal site, a city, an inland valley or high ground. The spread between them is wide. The latest last frost in the table is 22 June 2021 at Aviemore; the earliest first frost is 17 July 2000 at Aviemore.

These are air frosts. The Met Office says an air frost occurs "when the air temperature falls to or below the freezing point of water", and that it "is usually defined as the air temperature being below the freezing point of water at a height of at least one metre above the ground". It also notes that a ground frost can occur without an air frost. So the soil and low plants can freeze on nights that never appear here.

How the dates were worked out

For each station we read the daily minimum air temperature for every year from 1996 to 2025. A day counts as an air frost when any minimum air temperature reading ending on that day is 0.0 °C or lower. An overnight frost is dated to the day its reading ended. The last spring frost is the latest such day from 1 January to 30 June; the first autumn frost is the earliest from 1 July to 31 December. Grass and concrete minimum temperatures are not used.

A half-year only counts if the station reported a minimum air temperature on at least 90% of its days, and a station only appears if at least 25 of its 30 springs and at least 25 of its autumns count. Every one of the 30 stations chosen met that. Averages are taken over the counting years and rounded to the nearest day; the extremes are single readings, as recorded. Readings marked as observed and suspect are left out (detail below). The quality code on the minimum-temperature column has up to five digits (MESQL in the Met Office's MIDAS quality-control notes, checked 28 September 2026). 92.4% of the readings used carry a 6 alone, which the notes place in the last position: QC level 6, "Final (or only) areal or buddy job run and queries processed". The 3,605 readings with a status digit of 1, "Observed and suspect", are the ones left out; they count neither as a frost nor as a reported day. Everything else is used as supplied.

Source and licence

Met Office (2026): MIDAS Open: UK daily temperature data, v202607. NERC EDS Centre for Environmental Data Analysis, 23 July 2026. doi:10.5285/1854bb17ec454841b04e243a1352f25a. Data from the CEDA catalogue record (doi.org/10.5285/1854bb17ec454841b04e243a1352f25a). Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Frost matters most when you plant: see when to plant tulip bulbs, how to grow dahlias and the vegetable planting calendar. More on gardens, and on keeping a picture of yours, is in the Gardenkept journal.