The first temperature derivatives of the fundamental elastic constants of quartz are employed along with the thermally induced biasing strains in the equation for the first perturbation of the eigenvalue for the linear electroelastic equations for small fields superposed on a bias to calculate the resulting change in surface‐wave velocity with temperature. Since the description employed is referred to afixedreference state, the geometry does not change and the temperature coefficient of velocity is the negative of the temperature coefficient of delay. In all earlier work, a variable temperature‐dependent geometric state was considered, but the attendant shearing or skewing of the coordinate axes was not properly included. The temperature dependence of the velocity of surface waves propagating in various directions on various cuts of quartz is obtained. For cases in which measurements are available, the calculations are shown to be in substantially better agreement with the measurements than previous calculations.