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City of Leicester sits in the Met Office's the Midlands area. Each bar is one year's total; the dark line is the ten-year average, which is what a trend looks like once single wet and dry years are smoothed out; the dashed line is the 1991–2020 average of 810 mm. 2025 brought 717 mm, close to that. The wettest year here since 1996 was 2012 (1,084 mm), the driest 2011 (595 mm).
Rainfall over a whole region, not a measurement in City of Leicester itself, and a wet year is not the same thing as a flood: what floods a river is how much falls at once and how wet the ground already was. Average rainfall: HadUK-Grid v1.3.2, Met Office. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Rain gauge totals for the last day, week and month, by town:
Year by year, each figure divided by what changed about the measuring — the gauge fleet, the flood areas on the register, the overflows monitored.
City of Leicester, Environment Agency, SEPA and NRW gauges, 2002–2025
The last 12 years average 67.8%, against 0.0% for the first 12.
El Niño winter La Niña winter. Marked for context, not as a cause — these are states of the Pacific, and one wet fortnight moves a British year more than a whole season's pattern does. What El Niño and La Niña are, and what they did here.
The raw count went from 0 to 5 gauges with a high day between 2002 and 2025, while the gauges reporting went from 1 to 5 — which is what the chart divides by.
Each gauge's high level was last re-fitted on 2 October 2026, over that gauge's whole record. It is re-fitted monthly, so these percentages can move a little between rebuilds even in a week with no rain.
What this chart finds is BUNCHING — years when many gauges reached their own high level at once. It cannot tell you whether rivers run higher than they used to, and here is why: each gauge is measured against the level it itself reaches about one day a year over its own whole record, so every gauge crosses that bar about once a year by construction, however wet or dry its river has become. The bar is re-fitted every month as records grow, so a wet decade raises it and damps the very rise you are looking for. Dividing by the gauges that reported keeps the growing fleet out of the count; the like-for-like chart below holds the gauges themselves fixed as well.
City of Leicester, Environment Agency annual returns, 2021–2025
2021: 8.3 spills. 2025: 8.5 spills — 2.1% higher. Barely different — and with this few years, the ones in between move it more than any direction does.
The raw count went from 217 to 230 spills between 2021 and 2025, while the monitored overflows went from 26 to 27 — which is what the chart divides by.
Only five years exist, so this is a comparison and not a trend. The number of monitored overflows grew across them, which is why the figure is per overflow. Spills also track the weather: 2022 was a drought summer, and it is one of only five years here, so it pulls the comparison about on its own.
See all four across the whole UK, and how to read them
Rebuilt on 5 October 2026, from data banked up to the end of 2026. Only whole calendar years are counted, so 2026 will appear here once it has finished. The rebuild runs weekly.
Each page brings together the river gauges, official flood warnings and recorded floods around that place.
Aylestone · Leicester Hamilton · Leicester Spinney Hills · Thurnby
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