LONDON – The United Kingdom’s national weather service has confirmed that the country’s 2026 summer, a season defined by back-to-back blistering heatwaves, widespread drought, and destructive wildfires, stands as the hottest ever recorded in British history. Provisional data from the Met Office, which has tracked temperature trends across the nation since 1884, shows this summer shattered the previous record set just one year prior.
The mean average temperature for summer 2026 hit 16.5°C (61.7°F), eclipsing 2025’s average of 16.1°C (61°F). That 2025 reading had itself broken the prior record of 15.7°C (60.2°F) set in 2018, marking an accelerating pattern of record-breaking heat that climate scientists tie directly to anthropogenic climate change. Alarmingly, all five of the hottest summers recorded in the U.K. have occurred since 2003.
“These records are now breaking with increasing frequency, reflecting the influence of human-induced climate change,” said Amy Doherty, head of the Met Office’s National Climate Information Center. “Particularly notable is how much we’ve exceeded the previous summer mean temperature record, set just last year.”
Met Office climate modeling quantifies the stark impact of human greenhouse gas emissions: researchers calculated that fossil fuel pollution and other human-caused warming have made an extreme hot summer like this one 130 times more likely than it would be in a pre-industrial climate. Without human emissions, a summer this hot would be expected to occur roughly once every 1,000 years. Today, that same level of heat is projected to occur once every nine years on average.
Heatwaves began plaguing the U.K. as early as late May, with recurring heat events striking every month through the end of summer, including two separate heatwaves in July alone. The extreme heat brought tangible, devastating harms across the country. The U.K. Health Security Agency estimates that 2,877 excess deaths in England were linked to the May and June heatwaves. A June 26 high of 38°C (100.4°F) in Norfolk set a new record for the hottest June temperature ever recorded in the region, while the year’s overall peak temperature hit 38.1°C (100.6°F) in London on August 13.
Regional temperature breakdowns show England, Wales, and Northern Ireland all set new mean summer temperature records. Scotland bucked the trend, recording its sixth-warmest summer on record, with cooler and wetter conditions than the rest of the U.K. Even with the milder conditions in Scotland, the impacts of the persistent heat and lack of rainfall remain widespread: all of Wales and the vast majority of England are still experiencing official drought conditions months after the heatwave season began.
“Our hottest summer ever is a brutal reminder that we’re not waiting for climate change to arrive in Britain; we’re living in the middle of it,” said Katie White, the U.K.’s Minister of Climate Transition. “With kids too hot to sleep, families worrying about older relatives, farmers watching fields dry out, and firefighters and our armed forces battling wildfires, we’ve all woken up to a reality none of us wants for the people and places we love.”