We prove global existence of Yamabe flows on non-compact manifolds M of dimension m ≥ 3 under the assumption that the initial metric g 0 = u 0 g M is conformally equivalent to a complete background metric g M of bounded, non-positive scalar curvature and positive Yamabe invariant with conformal factor u 0 bounded from above and below. We do not require initial curvature bounds. In particular, the scalar curvature of (M, g 0 ) can be unbounded from above and below without growth condition.Richard Hamilton's [10] Yamabe flow describes a family of Riemannian metrics g(t) subject to the evolution equation ∂ ∂t g = −R g g, where R g denotes the scalar curvature corresponding to the metric g. This equation tends to conformally deform a given initial metric towards a metric of vanishing scalar curvature. Hamilton proved existence of Yamabe flows on compact manifolds without boundary. Their asymptotic behaviour was subsequently analysed by Chow [6], Ye [19], Schwetlick and Struwe [15] and Brendle [3,4]. The theory of Yamabe flows on non-compact manifolds is not as developed as in the compact case. Daskalopoulos and Sesum [7] analysed the profiles of self-similar solutions (Yamabe solitons). The question of existence in general was addressed by Ma and An who obtained the following results on complete, non-compact Riemannian manifolds (M, g 0 ) satisfying certain curvature assumptions:• If (M, g 0 ) has Ricci curvature bounded from below and uniformly bounded, nonpositive scalar curvature, then there exists a global Yamabe flow on M with g 0 as initial metric [13].