New Orleans, LA 70185 Frost Dates
70185, near New Orleans, LA: the frost window
Around 02/10 is the usual last spring frost, about 166 days away. Fall's first freeze usually shows up around 12/17, roughly 309 days after the last spring frost.
Zone 9b (25 to 30°F average annual minimum) comes from the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map; the frost dates above are the 1991-2020 normal at the nearest reporting NOAA station for New Orleans, not a forecast for this year.
Stretching the season past the first frost
New Orleans's growing season runs out in roughly 16 weeks — a cold frame or greenhouse kit is the usual way to keep cool-weather crops going past the first frost.
The actual range around New Orleans's last frost
02/10 is the middle of 30 years of NOAA records, not a promise. Getting tender plants in by 01/12 carries real risk, frost has hit that late in about 9 of 10 years here. Wait until 03/08 and only about 1 year in 10 sees frost after that.
New Orleans against the rest of the dataset
About 309 days separate New Orleans's last and first frost, putting it 3,624 of 40,283 ZIP codes nationally. Within LA, it ranks 118 of 710.
Learn more
Two guides worth reading on 70185: zone vs. frost date, on why Zone 9b and New Orleans's frost date answer different questions, and the frost range, on how to read the range around New Orleans's dates instead of trusting one.