The multi-port burners are utilised in various domestic and industrial heating appliances. The thermal performance of these appliances is usually performed with loading water test. An attempt is made in this work to thermally characterise the methane-air premixed impinging flame jets of multi-port gas burner employing air jet cooling technique. The present method has an advantage that apart from the thermal efficiency, the uniformity in surface heat flux, Nusselt number and effectiveness distributions can be found. The experiments are performed with inline and staggered configurations of multi-port plate burner. The thermal performance for varying mixture Reynolds number, equivalence ratio and burner to plate spacing is presented. The inline configuration performs better in terms of thermal efficiency. However, the staggered configuration produced more uniform surface heat flux. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd