Frost dates
Frost in North East England
What the stations recorded, 1996 to 2025
- Durham (102 m): 3.3 air frost days on average in April and 0.8 in May; 0.7 in October and 4.3 in November. May is the last spring month averaging half a frosty day or more, and October the first autumn one. About 43 frosty days a year.
The North East has one of the longer frost seasons in lowland England. Durham, inland at 102 m, is the long-running Met Office station here.
Your own garden
A station is one spot. Add your postcode for your area's average last and first frost.
Month by month
| Station | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Durham | 9.9 | 8.9 | 6.4 | 3.3 | 0.8 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0.7 | 4.3 | 9.1 |
What this means for sowing and planting
At Durham, air frosts still average most of a day in May, and April averages several. That puts tender crops such as tomatoes, courgettes and runner beans into June for outdoor planting in most years, and makes fleece worth keeping to hand for potato shoots through May.
Autumn closes early too: October already averages close to one frosty day. That shortens the time a late summer sowing has to finish, which is exactly what the last sowing date tool checks against your own frost date.
Local things that change it
The coast is milder
Whitby, on the Yorkshire coast to the south, records far fewer frosts than Durham. See Yorkshire.Height matters
The Pennine side of the region rises well above Durham’s 102 m. Higher gardens are colder than the station.Low ground can be colder
On still, clear nights cold air can settle in hollows and valley bottoms, so a low garden may be frostier than one on a slope.One station
We have no coastal Met Office series for Tyneside or Teesside in this dataset, so the coast is described, not measured, here.
What we can and can't tell you
Stations, not your garden
These are thermometer readings at a handful of Met Office sites, averaged over thirty years. They show how the region behaves, not what your garden will do this spring. A frosty day count isn't a last-frost date, and a ground frost can come on a night the station records none. For your area's typical last frost and how late one can come, use the postcode look-up above.
Keep going
Where this comes from
Crop windows, growing times and plant families come from Vercro's own curated crop catalogue, the same data the Vercro app uses. Where a published source says something different, we show both rather than choosing the convenient one. Reviewed 19 September 2026.
- Historic station data (monthly air frost days, 1996 to 2025), Met Office, Open Government Licence v3.0. Read 19 September 2026.
- A touch of frost: types of frost, Royal Meteorological Society. Read 19 September 2026.
Vercro reads your garden's own frost dates
Add your garden's postcode and Vercro uses its frost dates to say whether a sowing will finish in time, and its forecast to shape the jobs it shows on Today.