Rapid Flood Guidance to 2028 for England & Wales
Rapid Flood Guidance will keep running for three more years. The Flood Forecasting Centre has confirmed the service will continue through 2026, 2027 and 2028 after new funding from Defra. For those of us who plan, teach or look after people in England and Wales, that means timely guidance on the days when sudden flooding becomes a real risk.
Think of Rapid Flood Guidance as the fast‑acting partner to the daily Flood Guidance Statement. The statement provides the national picture; RFG only appears when risk steps up. On those days you will see an advisory badge on the front of the Flood Guidance Statement and, when needed, a short‑notice update explaining what to watch for and when.
Who should be on this? Local authority teams, emergency planners, blue‑light partners, utilities and transport operators, site and estates managers, outdoor event organisers, and school and college leaders. If you need to decide whether to close a footpath, move equipment upstairs, adjust a timetable or stand up a rota, RFG is built to support you.
The 2026 service is set to start on 6 May and run until mid‑October. That window covers the months when short, intense rainfall can overwhelm drains and produce rapid surface water flooding. The aim is not to add noise, but to flag the handful of days when minutes and hours matter.
Last year’s operational season shows how it is being used. In 2025, 2,450 responders were registered, up from 1,700 in 2024. The RFG badge appeared on 17 days, updates were issued on 10 of those days, and the 19 updates in total were downloaded more than 6,200 times.
Based on feedback from the 2024 trial, three changes made the 2025 service more practical. You can now subscribe by local authority area rather than broad regions so alerts are more relevant. The threshold for issuing updates was refined to avoid days with no or minimal impacts. And a redesigned production system means updates can be issued more quickly.
If you were signed up in 2025 you remain registered for 2026 and will get more details ahead of the start. You can check and amend your preferences at any time in your Flood Guidance Statement account so the right people in your organisation receive the right messages.
If you are new to RFG, you can create or use your Flood Guidance Statement account to sign up now. You can choose email and, if you want, text message notifications, and set the local areas that matter to you. If you prefer not to receive notifications, you can still access RFG through the Met Office’s Hazard Manager.
RFG sits within a wider effort to improve surface water flood forecasting. It was developed under Defra and the Environment Agency’s 2021 Spending Review (SR21) funding, delivered by the Met Office and Environment Agency through the Flood Forecasting Centre, and contributes to Defra’s 2018 Surface Water Management Action Plan. The improvement project completes in March 2026.
As Russell Turner, Head of the Flood Forecasting Centre, puts it, the extension keeps ‘trusted guidance on days of heightened flood risk’ flowing to those who need it. For many of us that ends up being the difference between a messy day and a dangerous one.
What should you do this week? Make sure your team is registered on the same account, review your local authority preferences, agree internal triggers for acting on RFG updates, and share a simple one‑page playbook so new staff know what to do when the badge appears.