Aircon Adviser research

The UK Air Con Index

We ranked 91 towns and cities across England and Wales on how strong the case is for home air conditioning, combining how hot summers get, how much the local housing overheats, and whether residents can realistically fit and afford it.

Analysis by Aircon Adviser. Data correct as of July 2026.

Top of the index

Southend-on-Sea

Score 91.8 / 100

Hottest summers

Southend-on-Sea

23.5°C average max

Places analysed

England & Wales

What the index measures

The Air Con Index is a measure of need, not of what people already own. A high score means a place is hot in summer, its housing is the kind that overheats, and enough residents own their home and can afford to fit cooling. Each place is scored from 0 to 100 across three pillars, then ranked.

Heat

40%

How hot summers get. Average June to August maximum temperature from the Met Office, over the last ten summers.

Overheating risk

30%

How much the local housing overheats. The share of homes that are flats, from the 2021 Census.

Affordability

20%

Whether people can act on it. Local house prices and home ownership, since renters rarely fit fixed units.

Key findings

Southend-on-Sea tops the table

A warm, flat-heavy seaside town with enough home ownership to act makes the strongest case for cooling anywhere in England and Wales.

It is not just London

London ranks third, not first. It is hot, dense and pricey, but only around 45% of Londoners own their home, and renters usually cannot fit fixed units.

The warm east leads

Commuter and coastal towns across the East and South East fill the top of the table, where heat, flats and affordability line up together.

The ranking

The ten places with the strongest case for home air conditioning. The full table of all 91 follows below.

Heat versus housing

Summer heat (across) against overheating-prone housing (up). Tap any point for its full scores, or tap a region below to highlight it.

Filter by region places Tap a column heading to sort

#	Place	Region	Air Con Index	Heat	Housing	Afford
1	Southend-on-Sea	East	91.8	100	98	66
2	Watford	East	89.0	93	99	66
3	London	London	88.9	100	100	50
4	Cambridge	East	86.8	100	94	50
5	Slough	South East	83.3	99	89	45
6	Reading	South East	80.4	93	88	45
7	Bristol	South West	76.5	75	95	53
8	Southampton	South East	76.2	84	100	25
9	Chelmsford	East	75.8	96	39	92
10	Oxford	South East	75.8	87	78	50
11	Colchester	East	73.5	100	41	70
12	Guildford	South East	73.2	90	38	94
13	Cheltenham	South West	72.6	81	64	69
14	St Albans	East	72.3	75	50	100
15	Norwich	East	71.9	81	97	16
16	Canterbury	South East	71.8	96	36	78
17	Crawley	South East	69.4	84	60	55
18	Ipswich	East	68.7	93	57	38
19	Eastbourne	South East	68.6	52	100	56
20	Medway (Chatham/Gillingham)	South East	68.3	100	27	67
21	Bournemouth	South West	67.8	43	100	70
22	Basildon	East	67.6	90	34	74
23	Bedford	East	67.4	93	34	68
24	Worcester	West Midlands	65.9	90	43	52
25	Portsmouth	South East	65.1	57	96	35
26	Bath	South West	64.9	72	45	81
27	Brighton & Hove	South East	63.4	37	100	62
28	Luton	East	62.4	75	56	46
29	Gloucester	South West	62.0	87	33	56
30	Chichester	South East	62.0	75	26	89
31	Peterborough	East	61.4	99	28	37
32	Swindon	South West	59.6	81	31	59
33	Basingstoke	South East	58.8	75	26	75
34	Taunton	South West	57.1	78	23	66
35	Milton Keynes	South East	57.0	78	33	52
36	Exeter	South West	54.7	52	61	51
37	Northampton	East Midlands	54.1	78	15	66
38	Cardiff	Wales	52.8	49	63	46
39	Hereford	West Midlands	52.1	75	10	69
40	Solihull	West Midlands	50.6	49	33	82
41	Coventry	West Midlands	50.4	69	33	39
42	York	Yorkshire	49.5	54	31	68
43	Newport	Wales	49.4	66	27	50
44	Manchester	North West	49.3	34	92	16
45	Leicester	East Midlands	48.9	63	50	18
46	Torbay (Torquay)	South West	48.9	25	75	58
47	Birmingham	West Midlands	47.9	49	59	30
48	Sheffield	Yorkshire	46.9	54	43	38
49	Walsall	West Midlands	46.8	63	30	40
50	Nottingham	East Midlands	46.1	60	53	8
51	Leeds	Yorkshire	44.6	46	47	40
52	Lincoln	East Midlands	42.3	57	38	18
53	Salford	North West	42.1	28	77	18
54	Derby	East Midlands	42.0	60	20	38
55	Plymouth	South West	41.9	31	59	38
56	Wolverhampton	West Midlands	40.8	46	42	30
57	Wakefield	Yorkshire	38.7	60	6	44
58	Stockport	North West	37.6	28	26	75
59	Warrington	North West	37.4	43	11	67
60	Dudley	West Midlands	36.8	40	19	57
61	Shrewsbury	West Midlands	35.7	46	0	70
62	Doncaster	Yorkshire	35.6	60	0	40
63	Chesterfield	East Midlands	35.1	49	11	44
64	Newcastle upon Tyne	North East	34.8	7	84	16
65	Truro / Cornwall	South West	33.6	31	13	70
66	Chester	North West	33.0	34	10	66
67	Rotherham	Yorkshire	32.8	49	4	44
68	Kingston upon Hull	Yorkshire	31.8	52	23	6
69	Harrogate	Yorkshire	30.3	7	27	81
70	Swansea	Wales	28.9	25	25	43
71	Huddersfield	Yorkshire	27.8	28	13	50
72	Liverpool	North West	27.1	19	51	7
73	Mansfield	East Midlands	26.8	37	1	46
74	Wrexham	Wales	26.1	31	8	43
75	Telford	West Midlands	25.8	34	3	43
76	Middlesbrough	North East	25.1	37	13	20
77	Darlington	North East	22.0	19	14	39
78	Stockton-on-Tees	North East	21.8	25	0	48
79	Gateshead	North East	21.6	4	40	29
80	Bradford	Yorkshire	20.6	10	23	38
81	Blackpool	North West	20.3	0	44	25
82	Preston	North West	20.3	7	30	31
83	Barnsley	Yorkshire	19.8	25	0	39
84	Wigan	North West	19.7	19	0	50
85	Stoke-on-Trent	West Midlands	19.2	25	8	25
86	Bolton	North West	16.1	4	15	41
87	Durham	North East	15.1	16	0	36
88	Carlisle	North West	13.4	0	8	49
89	Blackburn	North West	10.3	0	10	32
90	Sunderland	North East	10.0	0	12	27
91	Hartlepool	North East	8.8	0	9	27

Inside London

London sits in the national table as one place, but the need varies sharply across it. Scored against each other, the dense inner boroughs come top, while the leafier outer boroughs sit lowest. These scores are relative to other London boroughs, so a low score means low need compared with the rest of London, not the country.

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Methodology and sources

Each place is scored on three pillars. Heat is the average summer maximum temperature (mean of summers 2016 to 2025). Overheating risk is the share of homes that are flats, which are the housing most prone to overheating. Affordability combines the local median house price and the share of homes that are owner-occupied, because renters usually cannot fit a fixed unit without the landlord's agreement.

Every measure is scaled from 0 to 100 across all places (with the most extreme few capped so a single outlier cannot distort the spread), then combined using a weighting of 40% heat, 30% overheating and 20% affordability, and re-based to a score out of 100. London appears in the main table as one aggregated area, with its 33 boroughs broken out separately above.

The index measures need and realisable demand, not current ownership. It covers England and Wales (plus London as one aggregated area). House prices are for the year ending March 2023. A light search-interest layer was assessed and deliberately left out, as the geography does not match and it largely repeats the heat and affordability signals. Correct as of July 2026.

Data sources

Summer temperatures: Met Office; Hollis, D.; McCarthy, M.; Kendon, M.; Legg, T.; Simpson, I. (2018): HadUK-Grid gridded and regional average climate observations for the UK, v1.3.2.ceda. NERC EDS Centre for Environmental Data Analysis, accessed July 2026. catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/4dc8450d889a491ebb20e724debe2dfb
Reference: Hollis, D., McCarthy, M.P., Kendon, M., Legg, T., Simpson, I. (2019): HadUK-Grid: A new UK dataset of gridded climate observations. Geoscience Data Journal, 6(2), 151-159. doi.org/10.1002/gdj3.78
Housing type and tenure: Office for National Statistics, Census 2021 (tables TS044 accommodation type and TS054 tenure).
House prices: Office for National Statistics, House Price Statistics for Small Areas, median price paid by local authority, year ending March 2023.
Contains public sector information and Met Office data licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Analysis by Aircon Adviser. Free to reproduce with a link to this page.