Frost Date Lookup
Enter your address and get your spot's last spring frost, first fall frost, and the days between — worked out for a square about 820 feet across, from 26 years of daily data.
Your dates show up here
- Your last spring frost
- Your first fall frost
- The days between them — your growing season
Before your first frost
When a frost shows up in your forecast, here’s the short list.
- Cover what can’t take it. Tomatoes, peppers, basil, squash and beans. Put a sheet or frost cloth over them before dark, all the way to the ground. The warmth comes up out of the soil, so a cover that stops short lets it out. Take it off in the morning.
- Pick the last tomatoes. Anything that’s started to color will finish ripening on the counter. A hard freeze turns what’s left on the vine to mush.
- Bring the pots in. A pot freezes a lot faster than the ground does. Lemons and other citrus want to be inside before nights drop under 50°F.
- Mulch what’s staying. Garlic, carrots and perennials ride it out. A few inches of straw or shredded leaves keeps the ground from freezing and thawing over and over.
GardenTrack warns you before frost hits your plants.
Worked out for your spot from 26 years of NASA daily lows.
Frost dates off by about 6 days on average, checked against 6,857 NOAA weather stations.
FAQ
What do the 10%, 50%, and 90% frost dates mean?
They're odds from decades of daily records — 1995–2020 for the fine-grained surface, 1991–2020 for NOAA stations. For spring, the 50% date means half of years still get a freeze after it. The 90% date is the careful one: only 1 year in 10 sees a freeze later. Same 1-in-10 / median / 9-in-10 framing NOAA uses.
When is it safe to plant after the last frost?
For tender crops — tomatoes, peppers, basil — wait for the 9-in-10 date at 32°F, then check the 10-day forecast before you plant. Hardy crops like peas and kale can go in weeks earlier, closer to the 28°F dates. The live forecast always outranks a climatological average.
Why does the tool show three temperatures?
Because plants die at different numbers. 36°F can burn tender things like basil and cucumber seedlings, 32°F takes out most summer crops, and 28°F is the hard freeze that ends even the tough ones. Pick the threshold that matches what you grow.
How accurate are these dates for my yard?
Measured, not promised. Checked against 6,857 NOAA stations kept out of our own downscaling, across the lower 48: the surface's median-date error is about 6 days nationally, and roughly 4–5 days better than a nearest-station lookup where terrain is complex and the nearest station is far away. The 10–90% band held in 94% of cases. Where stations are dense and the land is flat, a good nearby station ties the surface — so the tool shows you both. It still can't see cold-air pooling in your valley; we're working on that correction in public and it hasn't cleared its accuracy bar yet. For what the usual nearest-station method costs, we measured that too: 13.1% of stations within ten miles of each other disagree about the last frost by two weeks or more.
What if my area never gets a freeze?
Then the tool says that instead of inventing a date. Where the record is too warm to compute reliable freeze odds — most years, no freeze — the surface reports no data honestly and the tool falls back to your nearest NOAA stations, which say the same thing in their own numbers.
Why does the surface data stop at 2020?
The open-access Daymet daily archive this surface is baked from ends December 30, 2020, so the window is 1995–2020 — 26 years. NOAA station cross-checks use 1991–2020. A rebake extending the window is planned; frost climatology moves slowly, so 26 recent years is a solid base — but we would rather tell you the cap than hide it.
This lookup's free and it stays free. No signup, no wall.
It's also where GardenTrack, the free garden app, gets your garden's frost dates. The app watches your local forecast too, and when a freezing night is coming, Today tells you which of your plants it'll reach — so you're not the person carrying 40 seedlings inside at 11pm on a hunch.
Meanwhile the one-off math lives here in the free tools: how many plants fit in the bed, who plants next to whom, and now when frost actually ends.