Met Office rain gauge at Heathrow · 1 January 1960 – 31 August 2026

How often it rains in London: all 24,350 days since 1960, wet or dry

At Heathrow it has rained, 1 mm or more, on three days in ten since 1960: as often as in Paris, and with half the rain of New York. Pick a date, a birthday for instance, to see it year by year.

Example · 3 August

On 3 August the gauge at Heathrow measured 1 mm of rain or more in 18 of the 67 years from 1960 to 2026.

1 mm or moreunder 1 mmno rain

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

2010

2020

Wettest: 1986, 20.0 mm.

In the 15 days around 3 August, over the whole years 1960–2025, 27% of days were wet.

A day here runs from 9 am to 9 am the next morning, as the gauge is read.

Where this date sits in the whole record ↓The whole record, without the text ↓

Every day since 1960, one mark each

Each year is one line of 365 or 366 days, from 1 January 1960 to 31 August 2026, where 2026 stops. A day has a mark if the gauge at Heathrow measured 1 mm of rain or more, darker for more. A blank day had less than that, and usually none.

Seven days in ten are blank

In the 66 whole years from 1960 to 2025 there were 24,107 days, and 7,220 of them were wet: 29.9%. An average year has 109 wet days and 256 without. The fewest came in 1996, with 73; the most in 2014, with 142.

The rain itself is light. A wet day brings 5.4 mm on average, and a whole year adds up to 611 mm.

There is no dry season, and no rainy one

The line gives, for each date, the share of wet days in the 15 days around it. It is lowest at the start of September, at 22%, and highest in November and in late January, at 38%.

So even in London's driest fortnight more than one day in five is wet, and in its wettest more than three in five are dry.

The same date, year after year

Followed through the years, a single date looks like a run of coin tosses. 20 October has been wet most often: in 32 of the 66 whole years from 1960 to 2025. 28 August has been wet least often: in 9.

None of this is a habit of the calendar. In the first 33 of those years 20 October was wet 11 times; in the next 33, 21 times. 28 August was wet three times, then six. With rain on three days in ten, 66 years are too few for one date to stand apart from its neighbours except by chance.

The longest waits for rain

Twice the gauge has gone 58 days without a wet day: from 30 May to 26 July 2018, and from 23 June to 19 August 2026. In the second, 56 days in a row, 23 June to 17 August 2026, brought no measurable rain at all, and July 2026 is the only calendar month in the record with a total of zero. The 2026 values are still provisional. England's drought of that summer has a page of its own.

The summer with the fewest wet days is still 1976: five in June, July and August together.

The longest runs of wet days

The longest unbroken run of wet days is 17, and it has happened twice: from 19 October to 4 November 1960, and from 26 September to 12 October 1993. The year with the most wet days, 2014, with 142, was also the year with the most rain: 864 mm.

The wettest single day was 29 May 1992: 61.8 mm, a tenth of an average year's rain between one morning and the next.

Is London rainier than Paris, New York or Rome?

A city can be rainy in two ways: how often it rains, and how much falls. Of the eleven other cities in the table below, only Madrid gets less rain than London, and only Bergen and Dublin have clearly more wet days. Each column below is one city's rain in an average year, drawn as deep as it would stand if none of it drained away, beside a person 1.75 m tall. Under it is the number of wet days. Every figure uses the same rule, 1 mm or more, and only the complete years that the station shares with Heathrow between 1991 and 2020.

0.5 m1.0 m1.5 m2.0 m2.5 m

1.75 m

616 mm

London112

622 mm

Paris109

618 mm

Barcelona56

648 mm

Bucharest76

769 mm

Rome79

1,258 mm

New York100

2,495 mm

Bergen199

wet days →

A year of rain as depth, 1991–2020. Rome: 13 shared years within 1991–2008, when London had 584 mm; Barcelona: 23 within 1991–2013, when London had 609 mm; the rest: 30.

Paris is almost the same as London: 109 wet days and 622 mm at Orly airport, against 112 and 616 at Heathrow. New York has fewer wet days, 100, and twice the rain: 1,258 mm in Central Park. Miami has London's number of wet days, 112, and 2.8 times its rain. Barcelona collects London's total, 618 mm against 609, on half as many days. Bucharest, Romania's capital, gets more rain than London, 648 mm, on 76 days.

Rome's station at Ciampino airport shares only 13 complete years with Heathrow. In those years Rome had more rain, 769 mm against 584, and fewer wet days, 79 against 107. Bergen, on Norway's west coast, shows a city that is rainy on both counts: 199 wet days and 2,495 mm.

The difference is in the size of a wet day. In London it brought 5.3 mm on average over 1991–2020; in New York, 12.4 mm.

Wet days and rain in an average year, on the complete years each station shares with Heathrow in 1991–2020
City (station)	Wet days	Rain, mm	mm per wet day	London, same years	Years
Paris Orly	109	622	5.5	112 days, 616 mm	30 1991–2020
Dublin Airport	139	781	5.4	112 days, 616 mm	30 1991–2020
Bergen Florida	199	2,495	12.5	112 days, 616 mm	30 1991–2020
Madrid Retiro	59	420	6.9	113 days, 627 mm	21 within 1991–2020
Barcelona Fabra Observatory	56	618	10.9	110 days, 609 mm	23 1991–2013
Rome Ciampino	79	769	9.6	107 days, 584 mm	13 within 1991–2008
Bucharest Băneasa	76	648	8.4	112 days, 616 mm	30 1991–2020
Cluj-Napoca, Romania	95	620	6.3	112 days, 616 mm	30 1991–2020
New York Central Park	100	1,258	12.4	112 days, 616 mm	30 1991–2020
Miami International Airport	112	1,712	15.1	112 days, 616 mm	30 1991–2020
Sydney Observatory Hill	94	1,149	12.1	110 days, 607 mm	26 within 1991–2019

The whole record, year by year

Move through the years or let them run. Point at a day, or tap it, to read its date and its total.

Year2026

Point at a day or tap it.

Which month is the wettest in London?

By wet days, January: 36% of its days have 1 mm or more. By amount, October: 64 mm on average. July has the fewest wet days, 24.5%. February has the smallest total, 40 mm, and is also the shortest month.

Heathrow, whole years 1960–2025
Month	Wet days	Share of days	Rain, mm
January	11.2	36.1%	55.7
February	8.9	31.4%	40.4
March	9.2	29.7%	43.2
April	8.8	29.3%	42.4
May	8.7	27.9%	48.0
June	7.8	26.0%	48.7
July	7.6	24.5%	46.5
August	8.0	25.7%	51.6
September	8.1	27.0%	52.1
October	10.2	33.0%	64.2
November	10.4	34.7%	61.3
December	10.6	34.2%	56.9

Short answers

How many days a year does it rain in London?

At Heathrow, 109 days in an average year have 1 mm of rain or more, going by the 66 whole years from 1960 to 2025. The fewest was 73 (1996) and the most 142 (2014).

Does it rain every day in London?

No. About seven days in ten have less than 1 mm, and most of those have none. The longest run without a wet day is 58 days, reached in 2018 and again in 2026.

How much rain does London get in a year?

611 mm at Heathrow on the 1960–2025 average, from 421 mm in 1996 to 864 mm in 2014.

Has London ever had a month without rain?

Once in this record, at Heathrow: July 2026, when the gauge recorded 0.0 mm, a value the Met Office still marks as provisional.

Which date is the wettest of the year in London?

20 October has been wet most often: in 32 of the 66 whole years from 1960 to 2025. The lead is within what chance produces: the same date was wet 11 times in the first 33 years and 21 times in the next 33.

How the days were counted

The measurements. These are the Met Office's daily rainfall totals for its station at Heathrow, on the western edge of London, 25 m above sea level. They were taken from the European Climate Assessment & Dataset (ECA&D), in its file of 12 September 2026, and run from 1 January 1960 to 31 August 2026: 24,350 days, none missing. 14 of them come from other series in ECA&D's blend: 12 from Northolt and one from a weather report, all between 18 and 30 June 1997, and one from a second Heathrow series, on 31 May 1996.

The check. Added up by month, the daily values equal the Met Office's own published monthly totals for Heathrow to within 0.1 mm in 786 of 800 months. Two months differ by more than 1 mm: June 1997, the month with the days from other series, and May 2026, where the daily file holds 7.0 mm on 13 May that the Met Office's monthly total, still provisional, does not include. For 1991–2020 the Met Office's published averages for Heathrow are 615 mm and 111.7 days of 1 mm or more a year; these daily values give 616 mm and 111.7.

What a day is. A rain day runs from 09:00 GMT, when the gauge is read, to 09:00 the next morning, and carries the date on which it starts. Rain that falls before nine in the morning belongs to the day before. This was tested: set against hourly rain from a weather reanalysis, the daily values fit the 24 hours that start on their date far better than the 24 hours that end on it.

What counts as wet. A wet day here has 1 mm or more, the count the Met Office gives in its climate averages as “days of rainfall ≥1 mm”. A lower bar cannot be carried across the record. Until early 1997 the totals use every tenth of a millimetre; from 1998 nearly all are multiples of 0.2 mm. Days with at least 0.2 mm number 152.3 a year in 1960–1996 and 178.5 in 1998–2025. Days with 1 mm or more also rise, from 106.0 a year to 114.6, and these values cannot show whether that comes from the measuring or from the weather. No document dating a change of instrument was found. Nothing on this page is a trend.

One gauge. Heathrow is a single point. At Hampstead, 21 km away and 112 m higher, the same days were measured until June 2016. The two gauges agreed on wet or dry on 91% of days; Hampstead had 10% more wet days and 16% more rain.

The 15 days around a date. The share counts that date and the seven days on each side, in the whole years 1960–2025. It is a count of the past, and no forecast.

Other cities. European stations come from ECA&D; New York, Miami and Sydney from the Global Historical Climatology Network of NOAA, the United States weather agency. A year counts only when both that station and Heathrow have every day of it. “mm per wet day” is the rain that fell on wet days divided by their number. For two stations a national service publishes the same 1991–2020 averages, and the difference is at most 0.2 mm and 0.1 days: 622.2 mm and 108.6 days for Orly (Météo-France), 648.1 mm and 75.6 days for Bucharest-Băneasa (World Meteorological Organization normals). Météo-France's averages for Paris-Montsouris, inside the city, are 634.3 mm and 108.9 days.

Sources

The daily values were taken from ECA&D, which makes them available for non-commercial research and education; this page is free and carries no advertising. They are Met Office observations. The Met Office data used here directly are its monthly station totals, which are open data. ECA&D asks for this acknowledgement: Klein Tank, A.M.G. and Coauthors, 2002. Daily dataset of 20th-century surface air temperature and precipitation series for the European Climate Assessment. Int. J. of Climatol., 22, 1441–1453. Data and metadata available at https://www.ecad.eu. The data providers in the ECA&D project are acknowledged.