Frost dates and planting times for your town

How the dates are made

Every date on this site comes from the U.S. Climate Normals for 1991 to 2020, published by NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information. For each weather station, NOAA counts in how many of those 30 years the last 32 °F night of spring came after each day of the calendar. The date with even odds is the average last frost; the dates with 1-in-10 odds on either side tell you how early or late a year can run.

We match your town or postal code to the nearest station with those records, up to 25 miles away, and show you the station and the distance. If the closest stations sit at very different heights and disagree by more than two weeks, we say so, because a valley can frost weeks later than a hilltop a few miles away.

Your growing zone is our own calculation from the same kind of NOAA records: the average of each winter's lowest temperature, split into 10 °F zones and 5 °F half zones. It is not the official USDA map. Planting times for each crop come from published university extension guides, counted from your two frost dates. Read the full method.