Rahul Somvanshi
Britain has just finished its hottest summer on record. That’s not a media headline — it’s an official finding from the Met Office, and the numbers behind it are striking.
The Met Office confirmed that summer 2026 was provisionally the UK’s hottest summer since records began. The seasonal mean temperature came in at 16.5°C. The previous record was 16.1°C — set just one year earlier, in 2025. The fact that records are now being broken in consecutive years is itself significant.
To be clear about what “seasonal mean” means: it’s the average temperature across the entire summer — June, July, and August — measured across the country. It doesn’t mean every single day was hotter than anything before. It means that overall, across three months, the average was higher than anything on record.
Some individual moments within the summer were also extreme. Kew Gardens in London recorded a peak of 38.1°C. Across the country, 54 Met Office weather stations broke their all-time daily maximum temperature records during the summer.
The Met Office also released an attribution estimate — a calculation of how much more likely a summer like this is now compared to a world without human-caused climate change. The result: a summer like 2026 was made roughly 130 times more likely by human-induced climate change.
The summer was not just hot. It was also notably dry in parts of England.
Now September has arrived, and the weather is shifting. London and southeast England are expecting very warm sunshine around Thursday, followed by some rain on Friday, then another warm spell into parts of the weekend. Further north and west, the picture is more unsettled. Northern and western areas of the UK are expected to see increasingly changeable conditions as September continues.
This matters because the temptation is to read “record-breaking summer” and assume September will be more of the same. That would be wrong. The summer climate record and the September forecast are two separate things. A record-hot June through August doesn’t carry momentum into autumn.
Two consecutive summer records broken back-to-back is the bigger story. The Met Office’s 130-times attribution figure is its assessment of how human-driven warming has shifted the baseline odds of extreme summers in the UK.
For now, if you’re in southern England, a warm Thursday is coming. If you’re in Scotland, northern England, or Wales, expect something more changeable this week.
