Rats on the Rise After the UK's Hottest Summer

If your phone has been busier than usual since June, you are not imagining it. The Met Office has confirmed that summer 2026 was the UK’s hottest on record, with a mean temperature of 16.5°C, beating the record set only a year earlier. The rats noticed too. In October 2026 the Telegraph reported that rats are overwhelming British cities after a heatwave boom, a story the Independent and the Sun ran the same day.

What the rat sighting numbers say

Rentokil reported this month that rat sightings between June and August were up 15% on the year before, with some of the biggest rises in northern cities including Manchester and Leeds. Part of the reason is simple biology. A rat needs roughly 60ml of water a day, and in a long dry spell it will travel further, and into more places, to find it.

It is not a one-off. After the hot summer of 2025, Rentokil said rodent activity was up 10% year on year, with Northern Ireland up 26% and Yorkshire up 20%. In November 2025, pest technicians responding to a National Pest Technicians Association survey reported a 38% rise in rat activity nationally, and up to 50% in the North East. More than half pointed to overflowing bins.

Council figures tell the same story of a rat infestation increase. Freedom of Information figures reported by the Yorkshire Evening Post show rat callouts in Leeds between April and June rising from 571 in 2025 to 649 in 2026, while the council’s pest control spending climbed past half a million pounds.

Why are there so many rats this year?

The heat does not work alone. Speaking to the Telegraph last year, Yorkshire pest controller Kieran Sampler blamed takeaway and communal bin waste for the numbers he was seeing. In Birmingham, the long-running bin strike led the NPTA to warn of a huge public health danger, and the city’s pest control bill ran past £416,000 in 2024/25.

There is a longer pattern underneath the headlines as well, and it points to a growing rat population in UK towns and cities, not a single bad year. A study published in Science Advances in January 2025 found rat numbers rising significantly in 11 of the 16 cities it examined, with warming temperatures one of the strongest factors. No UK city was in the study, but the mechanism is easy to follow: milder winters and longer warm seasons mean longer breeding seasons and fewer quiet months.

Add rodenticide resistance to the mix. CRRU monitoring reported by the BPCA found resistance in 73.7% of rats sampled in 2022 to 2023. Those samples came from sites where treatment had already struggled, so the true national picture is likely lower, but the practical effect is the same. Jobs take more thought, more monitoring and often more visits.

Fewer councils, more private work

At the same time, councils are doing less. A Direct Line (now part of Aviva) Freedom of Information study found that 24% of councils offer no pest control service at all, and only 5% treat rats for free. In Redcar, councillors linked a surge in infestations to the end of free council pest control, and one local pest controller described going from a couple of rat callouts a month to eight or ten a week.

A Kent pest controller told BBC Radio 4 that his callouts have risen by around 80% in five to seven years. For most firms that is not a spike to ride out. It is the new normal.

More rat callouts, same hours in the day

For a one or two person business, the challenge is no longer finding the work. It is getting through it. Every extra rat job brings an inspection, a treatment, a follow-up visit or three, and a report the customer expects to receive. If each of those reports takes an hour to write up in the evening, the busy season quietly eats everything else.

That is where PestOS comes in. It is a pest control app built for UK pest controllers, covering jobs, diary and reports, designed alongside a working pest control business, so that more visits do not mean more nights at the kitchen table.

Diary and bookings in one place, with follow-up visits added as you go
Recurring contract visits that schedule themselves
A guided on-site report, finished and signed before you leave
Branded PDF reports emailed to your customer the moment you sign
Site photos, GPS and timestamps as proof of every visit
Rodenticide justification, product label checks and COSHH built into the report flow
Room for a technician or trainee when you are ready to grow

Twenty extra rat jobs a month feels very different when each report is done on site. It is the difference between turning work away and taking on your first technician.

The heat will come back next summer, and probably the one after. When it does, will your business be set up to say yes to the extra work?

Sources

Met Office, “Summer 2026 provisionally hottest on record for the UK”, 1 September 2026. metoffice.gov.uk
PA via Yahoo News, Rentokil summer rat sightings up 15%, 20 October 2026. uk.news.yahoo.com
ITV News, rat activity increase after hot summer, 2 March 2026. itv.com
National Pest Technicians Association, “Rats on the rise”, 12 November 2025. npta.org.uk
Yorkshire Evening Post, Leeds rat callouts FOI, 27 September 2026. yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk
LBC, “Britain risks ‘rat plague’ after sweltering summer” (reporting Telegraph interview), August 2025. lbc.co.uk
Gold Radio / Sky News, Birmingham bin strike rats warning, 15 March 2025. goldradio.com
The Spectator, Birmingham pest control costs, 18 June 2025. spectator.com
Richardson et al., Science Advances 11(5), 31 January 2025. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
BPCA, CRRU rodenticide resistance data, 5 December 2023. bpca.org.uk
Direct Line (an Aviva brand), “Rat race: councils tackling pest infestations every two minutes”, 9 April 2025. aviva.com
The Independent via AOL, rat infestations summer warning, 26 August 2025. aol.com
Daily Express via AOL, heatwave rats warning (BBC Radio 4 You and Yours), 29 July 2026. aol.co.uk
The Telegraph, “Rats ‘overwhelming’ British cities after heatwave boom”, 20 October 2026. telegraph.co.uk