Britain has recorded its hottest summer since national records began in 1884, with provisional Met Office figures showing temperatures remained exceptionally high through June, July and August.
The UK’s mean summer temperature reached 16.5C, beating the previous record of 16.1C set in 2025. England, Wales and Northern Ireland also recorded their warmest summers on record, while Scotland experienced its joint sixth-warmest.
The season was marked by five widespread heatwaves, with temperatures reaching 38.1C at Kew Gardens in south-west London on 13 August. A total of 54 Met Office stations broke their all-time daily maximum temperature records.
There were 40 days when temperatures reached at least 30C somewhere in the UK, exceeding the previous record of 34 days set in 1995. Lingwood in Norfolk recorded 38C in June, setting a new UK record for that month.
Record heat leaves England and Wales in drought
The prolonged heat was accompanied by severe dryness. The Met Office said drought conditions were affecting the whole of Wales and around half of England, after rainfall remained well below average across much of the two countries.
July was particularly extreme, becoming England and Wales’s driest July on record. England received just 6.5mm of rain during the month, while Wales recorded 9.3mm; southern England received only 1.9mm.
Although rain and thunderstorms arrived in parts of Britain towards the end of August, the Met Office said they had done little to reverse the overall rainfall deficit. The UK recorded its third-driest July on record, while England and Wales both enjoyed their sunniest July ever recorded.
Dr Amy Doherty, who leads the Met Office’s National Climate Information Centre, said the records were being broken with increasing frequency, reflecting the impact of human-induced climate change.
Met Office analysis found that a summer as hot as 2026 had been made around 130 times more likely by climate change. Dr Mark McCarthy, the organisation’s head of climate attribution, said a summer of this kind would be expected roughly once every nine years in the current climate, compared with once in more than 1,000 years without the influence of human emissions.
