Published: Updated:
Yorkshire Water has no hosepipe ban and no restriction of any kind recorded. You can use a hosepipe and a sprinkler as normal. The Yorkshire Water supply area across the Yorkshire region. Yorkshire Water supplies 5 million people.
Confirmed 14 July 2026. Yorkshire Water is at drought level 1 in its Grid resource zone, which is a trigger point inside the company's own drought plan, not a restriction on customers. Coverage describing a Yorkshire ban starting Friday 11 July is the 2025 ban, which ran from 11 July 2025 and was lifted on 10 December 2025. In 2026, 11 July fell on a Saturday.
No hosepipe ban applies. You can use a hosepipe and sprinkler as normal.
We are an unofficial tracker, so Yorkshire Water’s own notice is the version that legally applies to you.
Yorkshire Water supplies 5 million people across West, North and South Yorkshire and the East Riding, and is the water and sewerage company for essentially all of it. The supply area sits close to the historic county boundary, so unlike most of England there is little ambiguity about who supplies a Yorkshire postcode. The exception is the north west fringe, where United Utilities reaches across the Pennines.
The company runs a mixed system: upland reservoirs on the Pennines and the North York Moors, river abstractions, and the Hull chalk aquifer in the east. Those respond to weather on different timescales, which is why Yorkshire Water reports them separately, and why a restriction here has historically been driven by reservoir storage.
Source: Yorkshire Water
Yorkshire Water's own status page, updated within the week this page was verified, reports water resources healthier than at the same point last year: reservoir levels higher than a year ago, groundwater and river levels also healthy, and no concerns about supply. That is a positive statement of position rather than an absence of notice, the strongest footing a no-restriction record can have.
The mechanism to watch is the company's own drought plan, which defines numbered drought levels per water resource zone. Being at drought level 1 in the Grid zone, as Yorkshire Water is, is a trigger inside that plan rather than a restriction on customers: it changes what the company does, such as moving water between zones or applying for permits. A restriction on hosepipe use sits further along the sequence.
Source: Yorkshire Water
A Temporary Use Ban restricts a narrower set of things than most people expect, and it is worth knowing which before one is ever declared. Section 76(2) of the Water Industry Act 1991 lists eleven uses, starting with watering a garden, cleaning a private motor vehicle, watering plants on domestic or other non-commercial premises, cleaning a private leisure boat and running through pools, ponds, fountains, walls, windows, paths and patios.
A watering can, a bucket and water you have collected yourself are never restricted by a Temporary Use Ban. Indoor use is never restricted, and neither is non-mains water. Yorkshire Water would publish its own concessions on top of that list, and those are where the practical answers live: turf, drip irrigation, Blue Badge and trade use are handled company by company.
More: what you can still do, newly laid turf, drip irrigation, business and trade rules.
If a Temporary Use Ban were in force here, breaching it would be a criminal offence. The maximum is level 3 on the standard scale, currently £1,000, under section 76(5) of the Water Industry Act 1991. It is not a fixed penalty: Yorkshire Water cannot issue one and would have to prosecute. In practice companies publish an enforcement policy that starts with a warning, so a first breach realistically produces a letter.
Yorkshire has the most instructive recent record in England, because it ran a full cycle inside eighteen months. Restrictions began on 11 July 2025, after the driest spring in 132 years, and were lifted in December 2025 once reservoirs reached 91.6 per cent and the Hull aquifer 77 per cent. Storm Amy and a week of exceptional autumn rainfall, the largest weekly reservoir rise in over thirty years, did most of that.
Two dates matter for anyone reading older coverage. The 2025 restriction started on Friday 11 July 2025. In 2026, 11 July fell on a Saturday, so an article dating a Yorkshire restriction to Friday 11 July is describing last year.
Source: Yorkshire Water
No. Yorkshire Water has no hosepipe ban and no restriction of any kind in force.
It could. A company can impose a Temporary Use Ban under section 76 of the Water Industry Act 1991 without the regulator's permission, so this can change within days. For Yorkshire Water it turns on its own drought plan.
Yes, both. No Temporary Use Ban applies in the Yorkshire Water area, so hosepipes, sprinklers and pressure washers are all allowed.
Up to 1,000 pounds, imposed by a magistrates' court on conviction under section 76 of the Water Industry Act 1991. It is not a fixed penalty: Yorkshire Water would have to prosecute, and starts with a warning.
Usually, but not automatically everywhere. Most companies exempt Priority Services Register customers and Blue Badge holders who cannot reasonably use a can or bucket, some automatically and some on registration. Yorkshire Water's own notice sets the wording.
Your water bill, on the water supply line rather than the sewerage line: in much of England and Wales those are two different companies. Yorkshire Water supplies the yorkshire water supply area across the yorkshire region.
Yes, in 2025. Yorkshire Water's restrictions began on 11 July 2025 after the driest spring in 132 years and were lifted in December 2025, once reservoirs reached 91.6 per cent and the Hull aquifer 77 per cent. Coverage of that restriction is still widely indexed and is often mistaken for the current position.
No. Drought levels are stages inside the company's own drought plan, defined per water resource zone. They change what the company does, such as moving water between zones or applying for permits. A restriction on customers is a separate step further along the plan.
The supply area covers West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, most of North Yorkshire and the East Riding, including Leeds, Sheffield, Bradford, Hull and York, with United Utilities to the west.
11 outward postcode districts resolve to Yorkshire Water here, as primary supplier or as one candidate among several. An outward code is the part before the space: SO14, not SO14 3AB.
Town pages here: Leeds, Sheffield, York, Hull. Each resolves from its own outcode rather than this company's headline status, which matters most where a town sits outside a restriction its supplier has declared.
Source: Yorkshire Water
Across the 186 postcode districts where Yorkshire Water publishes figures, hardness runs from 16.8 to 373.4 milligrams per litre as calcium carbonate, averaging 161.8. That is moderately hard on the water industry scale.
The figures come from the 2026 edition of Yorkshire Water Drinking Water Quality 2026, published 1 January 2026.
Yorkshire Water publishes this as mg/l without naming the species. We read it as calcium carbonate because the determinand is Hardness total and the dataset contains no calcium determinand. Evidence: determinand "Hardness total"; DWI code "HARD T"; no calcium determinand published in the dataset. We have asked Yorkshire Water to confirm this in writing.
Yorkshire Water’s published data · Contains Yorkshire Water drinking water quality data, via Stream, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Figures are published per census area, not per postcode, so they characterise an area rather than measuring an address. Hardness is a scale and taste matter, not a safety one.
Source of record: Yorkshire Water’s own status page, last checked 16 September 2026. We do not publish a hosepipe ban on the strength of a news report; every status rests on a primary source.