When is my last frost, and my first freeze?
Type your ZIP code for the honest answer to both — not one date each, but the odds. The date half of years have frosted by, the date it still frosts 1 year in 10, and the same pair for the freeze that ends the season, from the nearest NOAA weather station, named, so you can weigh it yourself.
Why a frost date is not a date
Every other site gives you a single last-frost date. A frost date is not a date: it is a percentile drawn from 30 years of records at a nearby weather station. Plant to the median and you lose the crop to a late frost in half of years. The tool above shows the median beside the 1-year-in-10 date, so you choose the risk instead of being handed one number and a false certainty.
Both ends of the season, the same way
The season has two edges and gardeners ask about both: the last frost of spring, which decides when it is safe to set out a tomato, and the first freeze of autumn, which decides whether what you sow in August has time to finish. Each is a distribution, and in each the 1-in-10 date is the one that catches you — a frost arriving late in spring, a freeze arriving early in fall. Enter a ZIP and you get both, with the same percentiles and the same station behind them; whichever edge is closer to today is shown first.
Where these numbers come from
NOAA NCEI 1991–2020 U.S. Climate Normals, 2,910 weather stations resolved to the roughly 32,850 U.S. ZIP codes each is nearest to. Every date is that station’s own recorded percentile, unshifted — nothing here is modelled, averaged, or invented. It is the same committed table behind every location page on this site, read a second way.
What this tool will not do
It will not call a weather service, guess a number for a ZIP with no station near it, or tell you your hardiness zone — the zone is a different quantity for a different question (which perennials survive your winter, not when to sow), and answering one by quoting the other is exactly the shortcut this project refuses. It gives frost odds, from records, or it says it cannot.