UK local authority heat map

The whole country shaded sixteen different ways. Every one of the 361 local authorities in the United Kingdom is filled by how it scores on whichever measure you pick, so the north–south gradient, the city–countryside split and the gaps between the four nations show up as geography rather than as a column of numbers.

This is the national companion to the London borough heat map, built the same way and from the same kind of sources: boundaries and population from the ONS, housing and qualifications from Census 2021, house prices from HM Land Registry, and life expectancy and deprivation from OHID. Every figure is fetched from a government API by a build script rather than typed in.

The colour tells you which way is up. A measure where more is plainly better (pay, employment, life expectancy) is drawn in green; one where more is plainly worse (deprivation) in red. The rest stay blue on purpose: a high house price is good news to an owner and bad news to a buyer, and shading where people were born, or whether they own or rent, as good or bad would be an opinion dressed up as a colour. In every case the stronger the colour, the more of it — deeper on a light screen, brighter on a dark one.

These are councils, not places. For the same country cut into actual towns and cities, drawn from the extent of the buildings rather than from administrative boundaries, see the towns of England & Wales.

Not every measure covers the whole UK, and the map never pretends otherwise. The four nations run their own statistical systems, so each measure carries a badge saying how far it reaches, and authorities with no figure are left unshaded and kept out of the rankings. There is more on this below.

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Every authority, ranked

The map’s data as a table, highest first, for the measure selected above. Type to find a council; the bar is each authority’s value against the highest in the UK.

Why some measures stop at a border

The United Kingdom does not have one statistical service; it has four. That is invisible on a map of England and unavoidable on a map of the UK, so rather than quietly dropping the measures that do not travel, this page keeps them and marks how far they reach.

Population, density and median age come from ONS mid-year estimates, which cover all four nations, as do house prices from the UK House Price Index (bar a handful of Northern Irish districts the index does not break out). Pay and employment come from two ONS surveys that run across Great Britain; Northern Ireland runs its own equivalents through NISRA. The Census 2021 measures stop at the Welsh border going north, because Scotland held its census in 2022 through National Records of Scotland and Northern Ireland publishes its own through NISRA, on different questions and timetables.

Life expectancy and deprivation are England only. That is a judgement rather than a limitation of the data: Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland each publish a deprivation index of their own, but each ranks its areas within that nation on its own scale, so a score of 30 in one means nothing in terms of a score of 30 in another. Putting them on a single colour ramp would produce a map that looked authoritative and told you nothing. Life expectancy is published UK-wide by the ONS, but only in an older release on pre-reorganisation council boundaries, which would leave the newer unitary authorities blank while making the rest less current.

Recorded crime is the patchiest measure here, and covers England and Wales. Police Scotland doesn’t publish to the source this comes from at all; Northern Ireland does, but uses its own small-area geography that the England-and-Wales lookup can’t join to. And Greater Manchester Police publishes nothing to it either, so its ten authorities are blank alongside them. That is 53 of the 361 left unshaded rather than shown as though they had no crime.

How to read it

These are councils, not towns, and they are wildly uneven. Birmingham is one authority of 1.2 million people; the Isles of Scilly is one of about 2,400. Much of England is split into small district councils while Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland use larger single-tier authorities, so a Scottish council covers far more ground than an English district and averages across much more variety. Cornwall, County Durham and Highland are single authorities spanning whole regions.

That unevenness matters most on the measures where a big rural authority averages a prosperous market town together with a struggling former coalfield and lands in the middle. The map is honest about the authority; it is not a claim about everywhere inside it.

Authorities are shaded in equal-count bands: each shade holds roughly a seventh of them, so the full range of colour is always in use and one outlier cannot flatten everything else into a single block. That makes the map good at showing order and poor at showing distance. The bands are computed across the whole UK and stay fixed when you filter to one nation, so a colour means the same thing however you slice it.

Some of the figures in the charts and tables on this page were compiled with the help of AI tools and may contain errors or be out of date. They are shared in good faith for general interest only (not as professional, financial, investment or purchasing advice) and should be checked against the cited primary sources before you rely on them.