‘2025 to be the UK’s hottest year on record’

London-  The Met Office has revealed that year 2025 was on course to be the UK's hottest year since records began.

With just over a week still to go, the average UK air temperature across 2025 is on track to end up at about 10.05C, which would edge out the current record of 10.03C from 2022.

"This is our future, encapsulated in data," Professor Rachel Kyte told the BBC.

"Now the question is 'how are we going to prepare ourselves and build our resilience to this?'"

Climate change continues to drive higher temperatures, scientists say.

A lack of rainfall and persistent warmth left the country vulnerable to droughts and wildfires through the spring and summer.

While temperatures vary naturally from year to year, scientists could not be clearer that human-caused climate change is driving the UK's rapidly warming trend.

"The pollution [carbon dioxide] we've put in for the last 20-30 years is now what is driving this warmth, and so not curbing emissions well enough means we're going to continue to see these kinds of impacts," Prof Kyte, the UK's special representative for climate, said.

She said the UK needed to become "resilient" to the inevitability of higher temperatures through further investment in nature and infrastructure.

‘The warmest summer on record’

In September 2025, provisional Met Office statistics confirmed that summer 2025 was officially the warmest summer on record for the UK.

Analysis by Met Office climate scientists also showed that a summer as hot or hotter than 2025 is now 70 times more likely than it would be in a ‘natural’ climate with no human caused greenhouse gas emissions.  

The UK’s mean temperature from 1 June to 31 August stands at 16.10°C, which is 1.51°C above the long-term meteorological average. This surpasses the previous record of 15.76°C, set in 2018, and pushes the summer of 1976 out of the top five warmest summers in a series dating back to 1884. 

Met Office scientist Dr Emily Carlisle said: “Provisional Met Office statistics show that summer 2025 is officially the warmest on record with a mean temperature of 16.10°C, surpassing the previous record of 15.76°C set in 2018. 

1976, which had a mean temperature of 15.70°C, has now dropped out of the top five warmest summers since records began in 1884, leaving all five warmest summers having occurred since 2000.