Here's why the spring weather in the Boston area wasn't nearly as bad as you thought

Welcome to June, Boston. Monday marks the start of meteorological summer.

The majority of New Englanders, if asked, would probably tell you we had a horribly cold and rainy spring this year. Sorry to disappoint, but they would be totally wrong.

Spring in Massachusetts, the months of March, April and May, is a strange phenomenon. It seems each and every year, expectations far outweigh reality. This spring was, in fact, warmer and drier than average. And, honestly, it wasn't even that close.

Spring temperatures

The vast majority of March days were above average, and the month finished 3.1 degrees above the norm. We even set a new high temperature record on March 10 (75 degrees).

April was our "coolest" month this spring (compared to norms) and it finished almost exactly average. We had several days in the 70s including a 3-day stretch in the middle of the month.

Temperatures in May finished 2.4 degrees above average in Boston and that included two record highs of 96 and 91 degrees.

This graphic may be the best illustration of just how "mild" this spring was.

Boston exceeded the average number of 60, 70, 80 and 90 degrees days.

Below average rain and snow

Both Boston and Worcester finished with well below average snowfall this spring.

Worcester had just 2.6" of snow, nearly a foot below the average.

Boston had 1.9" of snow, about half a foot below average.

All three months had below average precipitation/rainfall as well.

Precipitation in Boston was nearly 4" below average this spring, exacerbating the drought conditions already present.  

No doubt you are shaking your head right now in disbelief. There are likely two reasons for the disconnect.

First, New Englanders have a distorted view and expectation for what spring truly is. After a cold, snowy winter, the expectation is for a sudden change to warm, sunny days come March, April and May. That's not the reality.

Blame it on the ocean. It is so hard to get any sort of sustained warmth here in the spring months with a frigid Atlantic right next door. More often than not, while the rest of the country is rapidly warming, our little corner of the country lags far behind.

Secondly, we tend to base our seasonal weather memories and judgements more on how nice the weekends were.

And much like last spring, we had an inordinate amount of cool, wet weekend days this year.

Of the 27 spring weekend days, 18 had some rainfall and 16 had below average temperatures.

Most egregious, we had seven days in May when high temperatures did not go above 50 degrees. All seven were on either a Friday, Saturday or Sunday.

And to boot, nine of the 10 weekend days recorded some rainfall. It wasn't always a lot, but we did tend towards a lot of gray/damp weekends this past month.

Looking ahead to June

Alas, however you felt about Spring 2026, it is now in the rearview mirror. June is typically one of the nicest months to be in the Boston area. Average highs reach 80 by months end, and we also experience the longest days of the entire year.

Right on cue, we are forecasting 70s and 80s for the rest of this week.  

As for the wet weekend trend, we have some work to do. As of this writing, there is some rain in the forecast next weekend. Let's hope that is not a continuing theme of meteorological summer.