North-facing yards: how much sun do they really get?
The rule of thumb is two to four hours a day in summer, dropping to under an hour in winter. That is a fair average — but it assumes a house height and a yard depth that are probably not yours, and the honest range runs from almost nothing to most of the day.
Outside the US? The general North-Facing Garden guide covers the same physics without the US-specific numbers below.
What “north-facing” actually means
Worth pinning down first, because the phrase describes the yard, not the house — which is not obvious, and gets written about as though it were.
Stand on your lawn with your back to the back wall of the house and look out across the yard. Whichever compass direction you are now facing is the yard's aspect. Facing north means a north-facing yard. A phone's compass app will tell you in about ten seconds.
Which way the front of the house points does not come into it, and neither does the direction of the street. Two houses across the street from each other have their backyards on opposite sides, so one of them is north-facing and the other is south-facing — which is exactly what the label is for.
The useful part is what the label implies. If your yard is north of your house, then your house is south of your yard — the same fact said backwards. And across almost the entire continental US, the sun spends the whole day somewhere in the southern sky, never the northern. So your house sits between the sun and your yard. That is the whole reason a north-facing yard is the shady one, and it holds wherever in the country the house happens to be.
The one exception: in Hawaii and the southern tip of Florida, close enough to the tropics that the sun can pass directly overhead for a few weeks around the summer solstice, a north-facing yard picks up a little more midday sun than the rule above suggests. Everywhere else in the US, it holds year-round.
What if it faces northeast, or somewhere in between?
Most yards do. Very few plots line up neatly with the compass, and an aspect of northeast or northwest behaves noticeably differently from due north — usually better. What changes is not so much the number of hours as when in the day they arrive, and that often matters more.
| Aspect | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| Due north | The least sun of any aspect. What sun there is arrives early and late in summer, and barely at all in winter. |
| Northeast | Morning sun, then shade from late morning onwards. Good for salad crops, which prefer gentle early sun; poor for sitting out after work. |
| Northwest | Shaded morning, then sun from mid-afternoon into the evening. Often the more pleasant of the two to use, and the warmer, because it catches the sun after the ground has had all day to warm up. |
Your yard, rather than the three tidy cases
The planner on this site will tell you. Search your address, trace round your house and fences on the aerial photograph that comes up, and watch where the shadow actually falls — any hour, any day of the year, whatever odd angle your plot sits at. It is free and it takes a few minutes.
A table cannot do that, and no page of writing can — including this one. The answer depends on your own house, your own fences and your own plot. So take the numbers below as a starting point, not a verdict: they are averages, and yours will not be average. If you would rather work it out by hand than use the planner, there is a free method for that further down the page too.
The short answer
For a due-north yard around the middle latitudes of the US — think Chicago — here is roughly what to expect through the year. Further down the page is why this changes a lot depending on where you actually are.
| Time of year | Typical direct sun | Where it falls |
|---|---|---|
| Midsummer | 2–5 hours | Early morning and late evening, down the east and west sides — in midsummer the sun rises and sets well to the north, so it slips past the house at each end of the day. |
| Spring and fall | 1–3 hours | Briefly at each end of the day, and only on the parts of the yard furthest from the house. |
| Midwinter | 0–1 hour | Often none at all. The sun never climbs high enough to clear the roof. |
Those are the numbers most gardening sites will give you, and they are a reasonable starting point. The rest of this page is about why your own yard may sit at either end of those ranges — or outside them.
Why the average is probably wrong for your yard
Most pages that answer this question will tell you, quite fairly, that the amount of shade depends on the height of your house and the size of your yard. Then they give you an average anyway, because one page cannot know those things about a million different yards.
Here is the scale of what that average is hiding, and in the US it is hiding more than most places admit. How high the midday sun climbs depends on your latitude, and the continental US spans a lot of it — from about 25° in Miami to almost 49° on the Canadian border, a wider range than the whole of Great Britain sits inside. That changes how far a building throws its shadow enormously:
| Place | Midday shadow, midsummer | Midday shadow, midwinter |
|---|---|---|
| Miami, FL | Next to none — under a tenth of the building's height | About 1.2 times its height |
| Chicago, IL | About a third of the building's height | About 2.2 times its height |
| Minneapolis, MN | About two-fifths of the building's height | About 2.5 times its height |
Put a number on it. A fairly ordinary two-story house with the roofline about 23 feet (7 m) up will throw a midday shadow of roughly 8 feet in the middle of summer, at Chicago's latitude. In the middle of winter, the same house throws a shadow about 50 feet — over six times further, from the same building.
Which is a difficult thing to picture from a number, and an easy thing to watch. Being able to see that swing happen on a photograph of your own yard, rather than trusting an average worked out for a house a thousand miles away, is the reason we built the planner in the first place.
So whether your north-facing yard is usably sunny or permanently dark comes down to a handful of things that are specific to you:
- How tall your house is. A single-story ranch and a three-story house produce completely different yards on the same lot.
- How long the yard is. A 100-foot yard has plenty of ground beyond the winter shadow. A 30-foot yard may have none at all.
- How high the fences are. A 6-foot privacy fence on the eastern property line removes the early morning sun that a north-facing yard depends on in summer.
- What the neighbors have. A tall tree or a two-story addition next door can matter more than your own house.
- How far north you are. Miami and Minneapolis are not the same problem, as the table above shows.
Working out your own figure
There are two honest ways to get a real number rather than an average.
The patient way, and it is free. Pick a spot in the yard, go out every hour from sunrise to sunset, and write down whether that spot is in direct sun or not. Add up the hours at the end. It genuinely works. The drawbacks are that it takes a full day you have to be home for, it only tells you about that one spot, and it only tells you about that one time of year — which, as the shadow figures above show, is the part that changes most.
The quick way, and the reason this site exists. Search your address, and an aerial photograph of your own property comes up. Trace round your house, your fences, and any tree big enough to matter — it is a few clicks each. Then drag the time slider, and watch the shadow of your own house swing across your own yard, hour by hour.
That is the part that is hard to get any other way. You can see the shadow pull back off the top of the lawn through the morning, and you can see exactly where it stops — the line beyond which the bed never gets sun. Then drag the date to December and watch the same shadow stretch out and swallow the whole thing. It is the six-fold-plus difference from the table above, happening in front of you in about two seconds, on your yard rather than a diagram of someone else's.
It takes a few minutes rather than a whole day, it covers every part of the yard instead of one spot, and it will show you midwinter in the middle of July.
What will actually grow there
A north-facing yard is not a write-off, and the plants worth putting in it are a longer list than people expect. Several salad crops and herbs genuinely prefer a few hours of gentle morning sun to a full day of it — lettuce and cilantro bolt in strong sun, and are better off in your yard than in a sunnier one.
The full list, and an honest note on what a deeply shaded bed cannot do, is on the plants that cope with shade page. If your yard turns out to be sunnier than you feared, the seasonal growing guides cover what to put in through the year.
The one thing worth doing first
Before you buy anything, find out which parts of the yard get sun in winter, not summer. Summer is the forgiving season and almost any yard looks workable in June. The winter shadow is the one that decides where a permanent bed, a greenhouse, a clothesline or a seating area should go — and it is the one you cannot observe on the day you are standing there in July.