VacationSelector

Edinburgh or York?

Two destinations compared on nine measures of openly sourced data. Weight what matters to you and the verdict follows.

Your match

Edinburgh
✓ Best match
58
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and good for families with your weighting.

York
41
match

Wins on year-round weather with your weighting.

What matters to you?

Pick a travel style or drag the sliders. The match scores above update as you do.

The verdict

Choose Edinburgh if you want a city you can walk: more restaurants, more bars and clubs, more sights close together, and coast within reach, with 20 beaches nearby.

Choose York if you are travelling with children who want theme parks, if you want protected countryside close by, or if you want the warmer, slightly drier city, up to 21°C in July.

Scoreboard

Each measure scored 0 to 100. Open a row for the figures behind the score.

EdinburghYork
Beaches & swimming. Edinburgh leads by 55 points.55
EdinburghYork
Score550
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km202
Coast distance3 km50 km
Water distance3 km—
Places to eat. Edinburgh leads by 16 points.16
EdinburghYork
Score7054
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,023361
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3531
Museums & heritage. Edinburgh leads by 11 points.11
EdinburghYork
Score5746
Museums within 10 km3018
Museums within 2 km of centre2216
Share of museums within 2 km %7389
Unesco sites within 50 km32
Nightlife. Edinburgh leads by 21 points.21
EdinburghYork
Score6443
Drinking venues within 4 km1,193450
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre884353
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7478
Nightclubs within 4 km6514
Nature & day trips. Edinburgh leads by 2 points.2
EdinburghYork
Score3533
Protected land share 50 km %217
Landscape blanket share 50 km %116
Land share of disc %8595
Park area within 2 km166 hectares42 hectares
Good for families. Edinburgh leads by 29 points.29
EdinburghYork
Score7243
Tourist attractions within 2 km8713
Park area within 2 km166 hectares42 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km03
Sights concentration. Edinburgh leads by 21 points.21
EdinburghYork
Score6039
Notable places within 2 km12637
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Edinburgh and York are level on 54.
EdinburghYork
Score5454
Price level global84.984.9
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. York leads by 5 points.5
EdinburghYork
Score5156
Monthly daytime high6.6 °C to 18.8 °C6.7 °C to 20.9 °C
Monthly rainfall43 mm to 80 mm39 mm to 66 mm
Dry months01
0255075100

Where they differ

Edinburgh has 20 beaches within reach against York's 2, and about three times as many restaurants and drinking places near the centre, with far more nightclubs. It also has three times as many notable sights within walking distance and many times as many attractions for children, so a car-free week fills itself.

York has 3 theme parks within reach where Edinburgh has none, protected land over 17% of its surroundings against 2%, and warmer days, 7-21°C across the year against Edinburgh's 7-19°C.

Where they are alike

Neither is a natural base for days in open country. York has more protected land around it and Edinburgh more park space near the centre, but the countryside is something you travel out to rather than step into.

The weather follows the same pattern in both: highs of 7°C in January, a July peak, and rain spread through the year with no dry season. Both have museums and UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach, 3 near Edinburgh and 2 near York.

Which traveller are you?

Travelling with children: Edinburgh, for the volume of attractions and park space near the centre. York is the exception if theme parks are the point, with 3 within reach and none near Edinburgh.

Eating and going out: Edinburgh, clearly. It has around three times as many restaurants and drinking venues near the centre, and many times as many nightclubs, most of them close enough to walk between.

Quiet short break: York. It is warmer through the year, reaching 21°C in July, has a drier spring, and 17% of the land around it is protected for walks out of town.

What the numbers don't tell you

Treat the value comparison as empty. It rests on a national price level that is the same for both cities by construction, and this dataset carries no daily budget for either, so nothing here tells you which trip costs more. Neither city can be called the cheaper option on this evidence.

The beach count flatters Edinburgh. A total of 20 beaches sounds like a swimming coast, but the sea peaks at 14°C in August, so these are places to walk rather than swim. The warmest months are also among the wettest, so a high summer month is not a dry one.

When should you go?

The figures behind each month. Each row is shaded against that destination's own year, so the deepest cell is its best month for that measure and the palest its weakest. Shades are not comparable between the two rows.

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D
Daytime high, °C
Edinburgh
7
7
9
12
14
17
19
19
17
13
9
7
York
7
8
10
13
16
19
21
20
18
14
10
7
Sea temperature, °C
Edinburgh
7
6
6
7
10
12
14
14
13
12
10
8
York
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Edinburgh
62
47
47
43
49
63
65
69
55
80
68
63
York
53
44
39
48
43
61
56
65
58
66
62
60
Daylight, hours per day
Edinburgh
8
10
12
14
16
18
17
15
13
11
8
7
York
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Edinburgh
2
3
4
5
6
5
5
5
4
3
3
2
York
2
3
4
5
6
5
6
5
4
3
2
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Edinburgh: 1991-2020 normals, Edinburgh Airport (10 km from centre). York: 1991-2020 normals, Leeming (47.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Edinburgh is at its best in July and August, when highs reach 19°C and the sea is at its warmest, 14°C, cool for swimming. Both months are wet, at 65-69mm, and autumn is wetter still.

York is the warmer city through the year, reaching 21°C at midsummer, and its spring is the drier of the two: March falls to 39mm where Edinburgh sits nearer 47mm. Winter suits neither, with January highs of 7°C in both.

Getting there

Flying fromEdinburghYork
PalmaPMI
2 h 55 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
2 h 35 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
MalagaAGP
3 h 10 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
2 h 55 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 40 m
€58-103
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
Puerto del RosarioFUE
4 h 25 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
4 h 10 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
TenerifeTFS, TFN
4 h 30 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
4 h 20 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
ArrecifeACE
4 h 20 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
4 h 5 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
AlicanteALC
3 h 0 m
€106
EDI · 11 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
BridgetownBGI
8 h 30 m
no fares
GLA · 78 km
8 h 35 m
no fares
MAN · 104 km
AgadirAGA
4 h 5 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
3 h 50 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
6 h 55 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
7 h 10 m
no fares
MAN · 104 km

The busiest departure cities for these two, with a place kept for each other part of the world. Busiest means arriving passengers where an official count exists, and where none does, the number of non-stop services flown: official route statistics are published by the European reporting countries and by nobody else, so a table ranked on them alone would offer a reader in New York or Tokyo ten European cities. Flying times are estimated from the distance between airports, and every row is a city flown non-stop to both. Where the typical offer connects anyway, the stops are shown. Under each figure is the airport the flight lands at and how far that is from the centre, because the nearest airport is not always the one a route is flown to. Where both columns name the same airport it is one flight, and the difference between the two is the distance printed beside it. Typical return fares for 2026-09 to 2026-10, cached market data up to 7 days old. The figure is the middle half of the offers found, so a single price means they agreed and a range means they did not; for a typical route that middle half spans about a quarter of the median, and for the least settled routes rather more than the median itself.

Before you go

MeasureEdinburghYork
Official languageEnglishEnglish
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Pound Sterling (GBP)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftLeft
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999112 or 999
Elevation47 m25 m
Main airportEdinburgh Airport (EDI)11 km from centre158 non-stop destinationsLeeds Bradford Airport (LBA)39 km from centre73 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year10 days8 days

By the numbers

MeasureEdinburghYork
City population488,050208,400
People per km²1,884766
Museums within 10 km3224
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km32
Distinct cuisines in the centre7854
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone–

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Edinburgh or York somewhere new.

Browse every destination we have measured

Sources

© OpenStreetMap contributors, data available under the Open Database Licence. Place counts include data from Overture Maps Foundation (CDLA Permissive 2.0), assembled from Meta, Microsoft, Foursquare and other providers. Notable-place counts from Wikidata (CC0), weighted by Wikipedia language editions. Structured data from Wikidata (CC0). Weather data by Meteostat. Meteorological data provided by NOAA, DWD and others. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. Airport data from OurAirports (public domain). Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. Non-stop route lists from the "Airlines and destinations" tables on English Wikipedia airport articles, by Wikipedia contributors, reused under CC BY-SA 4.0. Currency from the ISO 4217 register maintained by SIX, cross-checked against country data from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0). Price level from World Bank open data (PPP conversion factor for private consumption and official exchange rate), CC BY 4.0. Time zones from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0); clock offsets computed from the IANA time zone database. Daylight hours computed from each destination's latitude using the NOAA solar position algorithm. Typical fares from Travelpayouts (Aviasales data). Route-level air passenger statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0.

Scores follow rubric v2; snapshot generated 2026-08-31. Typical prices can be up to 7 days old. Daily budgets are estimates from country price levels.