How much rain has fallen near you
Enter a postcode and read the nearest Environment Agency rain gauge live — 24-hour and 7-day totals, plus nearby river levels. Real readings, not a forecast.
Read →Hosepipe bans: who imposes them
A Temporary Use Ban is a company decision for its own region, which is why one area has one and the next does not. What it covers, and why gardens are the target.
Read →Where the water comes from
Three sources, in different proportions depending on the region. Surface water from reservoirs and rivers responds quickly to weather — a long dry spell shows up in reservoir stocks within weeks. Groundwater drawn from aquifers responds slowly, over months and seasons, which is why a company relying on it rides out a dry summer more comfortably and takes longer to recover from a dry winter. Some supply is transferred between areas.
That mix is the reason restrictions arrive as a patchwork rather than a national announcement, and it is worth knowing which one a household's own supply leans on — the supplier publishes it, and it explains most of what looks arbitrary about regional differences.
On the data
The live readings on these pages come from the Environment Agency's real-time flood-monitoring API under the Open Government Licence v3, fetched in the browser when the page asks for them. Coverage is England; Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland run their own monitoring networks.
Where a gauge has reported nothing, these pages say the gauge is silent rather than showing a zero. Those are different facts and collapsing them would make a broken instrument look like a dry week.