2025 is double-record breaker: UK’s warmest and sunniest year on record

2025 has broken historical climate records, with provisional Met Office figures showing it has been both the warmest and sunniest year on record for the UK.

Recording a mean temperature of 10.09°C, 2025 now joins 2022 and 2023 in the top three warmest years since 1884. 

This is an increasingly clear demonstration of the impacts of climate change on UK temperatures. This has been underpinned by a rapid attribution study by the Met Office, which shows that human-induced climate change has made the UK’s record-breaking annual temperature of 2025 approximately 260 times more likely. 

It is also only the second year in this series where the UK’s annual mean temperature has exceeded 10.0°C. 

As previously confirmed, 2025 also goes down as the sunniest year since the series began in 1910, recording 1648.5 hours of sunshine across the UK – 61.4 hours more than the previous record set in 2003. 

 But 2025 was also notable for rainfall, or lack thereof at times during the year, with the UK experiencing its driest spring since 1974. This shortfall has been eased by above average rainfall in recent months, with the UK’s annual total levelling out at 1041.2mm (90% of the average annual rainfall).