Climate rankings

Driest places to live in the UK

Castle Point is the driest place in the UK, receiving just 544mm of rain per year - that's around 53% less than the UK average of 1,150mm. Rain falls on only about 2.0 days a week.

Eastern England dominates this list. The counties along the east coast, from Essex to East Anglia to Lincolnshire, sit in the rain shadow of the rest of the country and receive less than half the rainfall of western areas.

If you're looking for somewhere with less rain, the data shows a clear pattern: the further east you go, the drier it gets. But less rain doesn't always mean more sunshine, so check the sunniest places ranking too.

Data last updated: 7 July 2026

All 350 areas ranked by annual rainfall, from driest to wettest. You can search for a specific area, filter by region, or switch to the Rain Days tab to see which areas have the fewest rainy days. Click any column header to re-sort the rankings.

Showing 350 of 350 areas.

A closer look at the top 10

Every single area in the top 10 sits in the East of England. Castle Point on the Essex coast leads at just 544mm a year, followed by Rochford (547), Southend-on-Sea (549), Maldon (553), Cambridge (561), Tendring (564), Thurrock (566), Fenland (579), East Cambridgeshire (579) and Colchester (580). Nine of the ten are in Essex or Cambridgeshire; only Cambridge breaks the coastal Essex cluster.

The mechanism is the rain shadow. Prevailing westerly winds drop most of their moisture on the higher ground of Wales, the Pennines and western Scotland; by the time the air reaches the east coast it has very little rain left in it. Castle Point at 544mm a year gets less than a quarter of what Argyll and Bute records in the west, despite sitting at roughly similar latitudes.

Against a UK average of around 1,150mm, the driest areas receive between 47% and 50% of the country's typical rainfall. That is a genuinely dry climate by UK standards. It matters practically: gardens water differently, drought orders bite sooner, and the reservoirs of eastern England are more sensitive to dry summers than the western ones.

Driest is not the same as sunniest. Castle Point at 1,734 hours of sunshine and Southend-on-Sea at 1,753 hours are sunnier than the UK average, but they are not in the top 10 for sunshine — that list is dominated by the south coast, from the Isle of Wight through Hastings to Bournemouth. The driest areas are dry because the westerly weather runs out of rain before it gets there; the sunniest are sunny because they face south into the light. Two related patterns, not the same one.

Key findings

  • Castle Point is the driest place in the UK at 544mm of rain per year.
  • Rain falls on only 2.0 days a week in Castle Point.
  • The top 3 driest areas (Castle Point, Rochford, Southend-on-Sea) all sit in eastern England.
  • Castle Point gets around 53% less rain than the UK average of 1,150mm per year.

Methodology

Areas are ranked using Met Office HadUK-Grid 5km-resolution climate data, averaged over the 1991-2020 reference period. Rainfall is the sum of the monthly totals for each grid cell within each local authority boundary. Where a very small local authority contains no grid centre, the nearest-cell fallback is used.

Read more about our data sources and approach on the About page.

Frequently asked questions about the driest places in the UK

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Source: Met Office HadUK-Grid, 1991-2020 averages. Crown copyright. Open Government Licence v3.0.