Methodology

Compiled by the TrackPostcode.UK data team · Data last updated 2 November 2026 · How we score every area · Data sources

TrackPostcode.UK turns open UK data into a single, transparent picture of an area: how much it costs, whether you could afford to live there, and what daily life is like. Every figure links back to its source and every score is built from a published method, so you can check our working rather than take a number on trust.

How the overall score works

Each area is scored from 0 to 100 in twelve categories. Categories are weighted, then combined into one overall score. Where a category has no data for an area, it is left out and the remaining weights are rebalanced, and the report shows how complete it is.

Below a minimum completeness we publish no overall score at all. A number built on a quarter of the basket looks exactly as confident as one built on all of it, and it should not, so the report shows the categories it does have and holds the headline figure back until enough of them load. Score-based rankings apply a stricter test again, so a thinly scored area cannot outrank a fully scored one.

One consequence is worth stating plainly: because safety and education use a different official measure in each nation, an overall score compares areas within a nation more reliably than across nations. The category breakdown on every report shows which measures went into it.

What the score bands mean

Every score on the site carries a plain-English band as well as a number, on the same thresholds everywhere: excellent from 85, very good from 70, good from 55, fair from 40, challenging from 25, and very challenging below that. The bottom of the range is split in two deliberately. A single band covering everything under 40 put a struggling city centre and the hardest-hit areas in the country under one identical label, which told you nothing about the difference between them.

How measurements become scores

Every category maps a real measurement onto 0 to 100 against the range that measurement actually occupies across Britain. Two rules apply throughout.

Nothing pins to the ends. Where an area falls outside the expected range, the score keeps moving rather than sticking at 0 or 100, so the coldest station and the second coldest are still told apart. An area at the bottom of a scale should read as the worst we measured, not as a broken score, so the very ends of each scale are held in reserve for genuine outliers.

Scales follow the shape of the measurement. Where a measurement spans orders of magnitude rather than a flat range, the mapping is logarithmic, so a doubling of the underlying figure moves the score by the same amount wherever it happens. Where more of something has diminishing value, such as a fifth pharmacy within walking distance, the curve flattens as the count rises.

Category weights and sources

Category	Weight	Primary source
Cost of living	15%	ONS
Affordability	15%	HM Land Registry
Safety	10%	police.uk
Weather	10%	Met Office
Employment	10%	ONS / NOMIS
Housing	10%	HM Land Registry
Transport	5%	DfT NaPTAN
Broadband	5%	Ofcom Connected Nations
Environment	5%	Defra UK-AIR
Healthcare	5%	OpenStreetMap
Education	5%	DfE and devolved governments
Lifestyle	5%	OpenStreetMap

Weather and outdoor score

Derived from the Met Office HadUK-Grid 1 km gridded observations, which interpolate the whole UK station network onto a 1 km national grid and account for height and distance from the coast. Each report reads the square kilometre containing its point, averaged over the last six complete years. The score combines annual sunshine hours, annual rainfall, mean summer maximum temperature and mean winter minimum temperature, with activity breakdowns for walking, running, cycling and gardening. Summer warmth is scored on comfort rather than heat, peaking around 21°C and falling away either side.

The grid replaced nearest-station matching, which described somewhere else for any area without a station nearby: Glasgow's nearest open station is an upland site 89 km away, Aberdeen's is in the Cairngorms. For the rare point the grid cannot place, the nearest long-running station is used instead, but only within 40 km; beyond that, weather is left out of the score and the report says so.

Where a figure is missing, as sunshine is at some fallback stations, the score is rebalanced across the measurements that exist rather than treating the gap as zero, and the report says so. A sunniest-places table is built only from areas with a sunshine figure. Contains Met Office data © Crown copyright.

Safety score

England and Wales use police.uk recorded crime within about a mile of the point for the latest published month. Where the resident population of that catchment is known the count is scored as a rate per 10,000 residents; where it is not, or the population figure is implausible, the raw count is scored instead, and the report says which. Scotland has no police.uk data, so it uses Scottish Government recorded crime as an annual rate per 10,000 residents at council level.

Recorded crime spans orders of magnitude: a rural mile records tens of offences, a market town hundreds, a city centre thousands. Mapping that onto a straight line crushes almost every populated area into the bottom of the scale, so the safety score is logarithmic and bounded. A very quiet area scores in the nineties, a typical town lands mid-scale, and the busiest places in the country sit near ten rather than at zero. That floor is deliberate. A zero reads as a failed lookup, and an area with genuinely heavy recorded crime deserves to be told apart from one where the data never arrived.

Where the England and Wales figure is a raw count rather than a rate, busy centres inevitably record more than quiet suburbs; either way it is not a national percentile. Where a force does not publish street-level data, or the count is too low to be credible for the surrounding density, we show no score rather than an unearned safe one.

A volume over one month and a rate per head over a year are not the same measurement, and putting both on a 0 to 100 scale does not make them comparable. Ranking one against the other would measure the data source rather than the place, so safety rankings are published per nation, each table built from a single basis. A single UK table appears only if every ranked area is scored on the same per-resident rate.

Education score

Education is published separately by each nation using measures that are not interchangeable, so each nation keeps its own and every report states which one it is showing.

• England - Department for Education Attainment 8, the average score across eight GCSE-level qualifications, by local authority for state-funded schools. Two-tier areas are published at county level, so districts inherit their county figure.
• Scotland - Scottish Government average highest SCQF qualification level of school leavers, a three-year rolling average published for intermediate zones rather than councils. This is the most granular figure on the site.
• Wales - Welsh Government Capped 9 average points score (interim measure), by local authority.

Each is mapped to 0 to 100 against the spread actually observed across that nation, with the ends of that spread held open so an authority above or below the observed range is still separated from the rest rather than flattened into a shared top or bottom mark. An education score is therefore meaningful between areas within a nation, but not across nations, and we do not publish a single UK education ranking.

Healthcare and lifestyle scores

Both are counts of facilities near the point, from OpenStreetMap. Healthcare rests on the everyday essentials - a GP, a pharmacy and a dentist within reach - with a hospital treated as a bonus on top rather than a requirement, because most places in Britain do not have one nearby and scoring them as though they should be would penalise being ordinary. Lifestyle counts six groups separately, so an area with some of everything scores better than one with a glut of a single thing. Gardens count as green space only when they are public; mapped private and residential gardens are left out.

Two limits are worth knowing. OpenStreetMap coverage is contributed rather than official, so a thinly mapped area can look worse served than it is, and countryside is rarely tagged the way a town park is, which understates green space outside built-up areas. And an empty result is ambiguous: a village really can have no pharmacy within two kilometres, but a failed lookup looks identical. We separate the two by checking whether anything at all was found nearby, and treat an entirely empty result as a gap rather than publishing a bottom score we cannot stand behind.

Data resolution

Open data is published at different geographic levels, and we always use the most granular level available, which means a single report mixes resolutions.

Measured around the exact point: weather (the Met Office 1 km climate grid square), crime in England and Wales (within about a mile), healthcare and lifestyle amenities (within about two kilometres, from OpenStreetMap), public transport stops, and air quality.

Council-area statistics, shared by every place in that authority: cost of living, affordability, housing, employment, broadband, Scottish safety, and education in England and Wales.

Finer than a council but coarser than a point: Scottish education, published for intermediate zones of roughly 2,500 to 6,000 residents.

Each report carries a "How detailed is this report" section stating exactly this, because a score is only trustworthy when you know what it measures. This open-source intelligence (OSINT) approach means every number can be traced to the public dataset it came from.

How we check that each figure describes the right place

The hardest failure to spot in work like this is not a missing number, it is a real number filed against the wrong place. A council renamed, two towns sharing a name, a statistical code retired after a boundary change: any of these can attach one area's figures to another's report, and the result looks completely normal on the page. So this is checked rather than assumed.

Every imported figure is stamped, at the moment it is written, with the authority it describes, that authority's official statistical code, the geographic level it was published at, and the date it was imported. An automated audit then re-resolves every area the site publishes and checks, for each category, that the figure it reads back was recorded for that same authority. It also confirms that the coordinates used for the point-level categories genuinely fall inside the area being named, and that figures sourced by lookup, such as house prices and employment, came back from the region or authority actually asked for rather than a similarly named one.

The audit runs across every area in the published index and every local authority we hold data for, not a sample. Where it finds a mismatch the figure is treated as unusable rather than published with a caveat. Some of the checks exist because they have caught something real: a town resolving to a same-named village two hundred miles away, and two councils whose statistical codes changed after a 2025 boundary change while our source file still carried the old ones.

Known limitations

Stated here rather than left to be discovered, because a limit you know about is a different thing from one you do not.

• Northern Ireland is not covered. Several of the underlying datasets, including police.uk street-level crime and the national transport stop register, do not extend to it, and a report built on the remainder would be weaker than no report.
• Some police forces publish no street-level data. Greater Manchester is the largest. Those areas carry no safety score rather than an unearned one, which is why their reports show a lower completeness figure.
• Two authorities are absent from several national statistics. The City of London and the Isles of Scilly are excluded by the publishers themselves, because their resident populations are too small to sample reliably.
• Scottish rents are published for broad rental market areas, not councils, so several councils share one figure. The report names the rental area it came from.
• Cross-nation comparison is limited by the sources. Safety and education use a different official measure in each nation. We publish these per nation and never as a single UK table.
• Amenity data is contributed, not official. OpenStreetMap coverage varies, so a thinly mapped area can look worse served than it is.

Corrections

When a figure turns out to be wrong we correct it at the source and re-run the affected reports, rather than patching the page. If you think something is wrong, the contact page is the fastest route: include the area and the category, and because every figure traces to a named public dataset, a disagreement can usually be settled against that source rather than debated.

What we never do

We never invent figures. If a dataset is not yet loaded for an area, we show a clear pending note rather than an estimate. A missing category is left out of the overall score and the remaining weights rebalanced: it is never filled in with a national or regional average, and no score on this site is modelled, smoothed or predicted from a neighbouring area.

We do not accept payment to change a score, a ranking position or the wording of a report, and no advertiser sees a report before it is published.

Methodology last reviewed August 2026. The live health of every data feed, and when each was last refreshed, is on the data status page.

What the index shows

The sections above describe how a score is built. These describe what the scores, read together, actually say about the country - recomputed on every build rather than written once.

These describe the 539 areas in our index, not every place in Britain, and the index is not a random sample: it is weighted towards towns and cities people search for. Coverage gaps are not evenly spread either - weather, lifestyle and safety are the categories most often missing, and remote areas lose amenity data more often than urban ones because they are mapped less thoroughly. A relationship measured across this index therefore partly reflects what we can measure. Every figure below states the number of areas it rests on.

What does the average UK area score?

The median area in our index scores 67 out of 100, across 539 scored areas. By nation the medians are England 66 (449 areas), Scotland 70 (53 areas) and Wales 70 (37 areas). Half of all areas score above that figure and half below, so a score around 67 is an ordinary British area rather than a poor one.

What separates the highest scoring areas from an average one?

Comparing the top tenth of our index against the median area, the widest gaps are in affordability (90 against 68), lifestyle (66 against 54) and cost of living (83 against 72). The narrowest is education, where the top areas and the median are within 1 points of each other, so it separates almost nothing. One runs the other way: the top tenth score 5 points LOWER on employment than the median area (54 against 59). That is the trade-off built into the weighting rather than a fault in those areas - the categories that carry the most weight reward space and affordability, which are the things a well-served place gives up. None of this is the same as which categories carry the most weight: a category worth five per cent of the score can still be the one that tells the best areas apart.

Do areas that score well on cost of living also score well on affordability?

Across 538 areas the two move strongly together (Spearman 0.86). Areas strong on one tend to be strong on the other, so these two rarely have to be traded off against each other. Measured on ranks, so it holds whether or not the relationship is a straight line.

Do areas that score well on safety also score well on lifestyle?

Across 320 areas the two move strongly against each other (Spearman -0.73). In practice that means an area strong on one tends to be weaker on the other, which is the trade-off behind most relocation decisions rather than a fault in either place. Measured on ranks, so it holds whether or not the relationship is a straight line.

Do areas that score well on safety also score well on transport?

Across 505 areas the two move strongly against each other (Spearman -0.70). In practice that means an area strong on one tends to be weaker on the other, which is the trade-off behind most relocation decisions rather than a fault in either place. Measured on ranks, so it holds whether or not the relationship is a straight line.

Do more expensive areas score better?

Across 538 areas with an average property price on file, price and overall score move strongly against each other (Spearman -0.78). More expensive areas tend to score lower overall, because affordability and housing are weighted at 25 per cent between them and both fall as prices rise.

153 of 539 areas carry a measured score in all twelve categories. Recomputed on every index build, so these figures move with the data rather than being written once.