See an area before you visit it

How to use it

1. Pick a spot. Search a postcode, town or street, or tap the map.
2. Set the radius. Choose how far around the pin to look, and what the map colours show.
3. Read the scores. 10 is best, 1 is worst. The number, the word and the colour always go together, and the ? beside a score says what it measures.

1. 10Excellent
2. 9
3. 8Good
4. 7
5. 6Fair
6. 5
7. 4Weak
8. 3
9. 2Poor
10. 1

A guide, not advice

Crime by Postcode is a guide, not advice. It describes recorded crime in the past and how near services are. It cannot predict what will happen to you, and it is no substitute for visiting an area, talking to neighbours or asking a professional.

The Safety score

The Safety score is about crime only, and about how serious the crime is, not how many records there are. Police forces publish the location of each crime they record; we place every crime in the neighbourhood it happened in (an LSOA in England and Wales, a Data Zone in Northern Ireland). Each crime is then weighted by the Office for National Statistics Crime Severity Score: the typical sentence, in days, given for that kind of offence. A robbery counts 994, a burglary 465, violence and sexual offences 296, drugs 214, possession of weapons 177, vehicle crime 71, criminal damage and arson 25, public order 19 and shoplifting 13, so one robbery weighs as much as about 76 shoplifting offences. These are the ONS weights per police.uk crime category (edition: year ending March 2025; the mix of offences inside each category is averaged over all recorded crime in England and Wales in 2025/26).

Add up the weights of every crime in a neighbourhood and divide by its residents and the years covered: that is its severity per resident per year. We show it as a multiple of the average for the local authority the neighbourhood is in, worked out the same way over all its neighbourhoods, followed by the England and Wales figure ("1.3× the Chesterfield average (2.2× the England and Wales average)"): local first, because that is the comparison that matters when choosing between nearby streets. For context we also show the plain number of recorded crimes per 1,000 residents, with the types that make up most of the severity.

Anti-social behaviour is not a crime, and the ONS leaves it out of its own score, so it is not part of the Safety score. It is shown on its own line as incidents per 1,000 residents a year.

The severity per resident is ranked against every neighbourhood (or, for a postcode district, every district). The safest tenth scores 10, the next tenth 9, and so on down to 1 for the tenth with the most serious crime.

Every score on the site runs from 1 to 10, and 10 is always the best. Words go with the numbers: 9-10 excellent (for safety, very low crime), 7-8 good, 5-6 fair (average crime), 3-4 weak (above-average crime) and 1-2 poor (high crime, the worst fifth of neighbourhoods). The colour runs from green to red, and the number is always shown too.

Supermarket and transport scores

The supermarket score looks at the distance from the middle of each neighbourhood to the nearest large supermarket (over about 1,400 square metres) and to the nearest shop of any size. The transport score counts bus stops within 400 metres and adds the distance to the nearest railway station and tram or metro stop. Distances are in a straight line, not along the street, and a stop on the map is not a promise of a service. Both scores use fixed distance bands, from 10 (excellent access) to 1 (poor access), rather than a ranking against other places; a district score is the average of its neighbourhoods, weighted by population.

School and health scores

The schools score takes the best Ofsted outcome among primary schools and among secondary schools within 2 km of the middle of each neighbourhood, and averages the two. If there is no rated school of a kind within 2 km, that half counts as 1, and the page says so. All-through schools count as both. Ofsted changed its inspections in November 2025: schools with a new report card are shown by the middle of their three graded areas (and a failed safeguarding standard caps it at the lowest outcome), schools not yet inspected that way keep their last overall grade, a later ungraded inspection that confirms a grade (for example "School remains Good") counts as that grade, and the newest of these is used. A school that has not been inspected since it changed (for example, became an academy) is shown with its predecessor's outcome, and the page says so. A district's schools score is the average of its neighbourhoods' scores, weighted by population, and it lists the best rated schools within 2 km of any of its main neighbourhoods. Schools Ofsted has not rated are left out. Ofsted only inspects schools in England, so Wales and Northern Ireland have no schools score.

The health score looks at the distance to the nearest GP surgery (the closer, the higher the score) and to the nearest hospital with an A&E department (likewise, over much longer distances), and averages the two. It measures how near care is, not how good it is or whether a practice is taking new patients. Care Quality Commission ratings of GP surgeries are shown for England only. Hospitals mapped in OpenStreetMap only as complex areas may be missing.

The Living score

The Living score is a weighted average of four theme scores: schools 33%, transport 25%, health 25% and supermarkets 17%. Crime is not part of it: it is the separate Safety score, shown beside it, and the two are never blended. When a theme has no score (schools in Wales and Northern Ireland, for example) it is left out and the weights of the rest are scaled up, and the page says so. The result is rounded to one decimal; the colour and the word beside it follow the nearest whole score. The weights are a judgement, not a measurement: a family may care far more about schools than about shops, so read the themes as well.

Some police forces stopped publishing data years ago (Greater Manchester Police after June 2019, for instance). Where a district's crime data ends more than a year before the newest month, the page says so; the Safety score then describes the years before that.

The map pin

On the home page you can drop a pin anywhere in England, Wales or Northern Ireland and choose a radius from 100 m to 10 km. The neighbourhood under the pin is shown first, with its scores and its own population. The circle around the pin is a separate section: it covers every postcode within the radius, which usually means parts of several neighbourhoods. Each neighbourhood's people, and its crimes, are shared out over its live postcodes, and the circle counts the share of each neighbourhood's postcodes that falls inside it. People live where postcodes are, so fields, parks and industrial land add nobody. The crime figure is then per resident like everywhere else on the site. Schools, shops, stations, stops and GP surgeries are those whose straight-line distance from the pin is within the radius; the nearest hospital with A&E is shown even when it is further away. Where a police force published fewer months than others in the circle, the panel says so. Scotland has no data, and a pin in the sea or outside the UK shows none.

Where the data comes from, and how recent it is

• Police recorded crimeSeptember 2016 to August 2026. Some forces stopped or paused publishing, so the dates differ by area; the page says so where it matters.
• Ofsted inspections and school details (England)Newest version published when this release was built, 9 October 2026.
• GP surgeries and CQC ratings (England)Newest version published when this release was built, 9 October 2026.
• Railway stations, tram stops and bus stops (NaPTAN, Translink)Newest version published when this release was built, 9 October 2026.
• Supermarkets (Geolytix)Newest version published when this release was built, 9 October 2026.
• Hospitals and some GP locations (OpenStreetMap)Newest version published when this release was built, 9 October 2026.
• Neighbourhood boundaries and population (ONS, NISRA)2021 boundaries with mid-2024 population estimates. Postcode lookup: ONS National Statistics Postcode Lookup, Newest version published when this release was built, 9 October 2026.
• Place and street names (OS Open Names)Newest version published when this release was built, 9 October 2026.

The figures are rebuilt once a month; the current release was built on 9 October 2026.

What it cannot tell you

• Greater Manchester Police has published nothing since June 2019, so Greater Manchester shows crime from 2016 to June 2019 with a notice. British Transport Police stopped in February 2025.
• Scotland is not covered: Police Scotland does not publish this data in the same open form.
• Schools scores and CQC ratings are England only. Wales and Northern Ireland have no schools score.
• Crime is recorded where it happens but measured per resident, so busy city and town centres, where few people live and many come to shop, work and go out, show rates far higher than the risk to someone living there. We treat a neighbourhood as a busy centre when it records at least 400 crimes per 1,000 residents a year and at least 30% of them are theft from shops or from people, or when it records more crimes than it has residents. Busy centres get no Safety score, because compared with residential areas the number would mislead, and they are left out when every other neighbourhood is ranked or blended. Their real crime figures are still shown, and clicking a centre on the map explains why it is not scored. The same applies to a postcode district or a map circle where half or more of the residents live in busy centres.
• Where a radius cuts through a neighbourhood, residents are assumed to be spread evenly across it, so those figures are estimates.
• Recorded crime depends on what people report and how forces record it. Rates are not directly comparable between years when recording practice changed.

Attribution and licences

• Crime: street-level data from data.police.uk, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
• Crime severity weights: Office for National Statistics, Crime Severity Score (year ending March 2025), and Home Office police recorded crime open data (financial year 2025/26, used to average the weights inside each police.uk category). Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
• Neighbourhood boundaries and population: Office for National Statistics (LSOA 2021 boundaries, mid-2024 estimates) and NISRA (Data Zones 2021, mid-2024 estimates), under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
• Postcode lookup: ONS National Statistics Postcode Lookup. Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
• Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026.
• Contains Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right 2026.
• Contains Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
• Supermarkets: Geolytix UK Retail Points, published under the Geolytix Open Data Licence. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v4.0; Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2021; Contains Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right 2021; Contains National Statistics data © Crown copyright and database right 2021.
• Bus stops, railway stations and tram stops in Great Britain: DfT National Public Transport Access Nodes (NaPTAN), under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
• Northern Ireland bus stops and railway stations: Translink, via OpenDataNI, under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
• Schools: Get Information About Schools (GIAS), Department for Education, and Ofsted inspection outcomes, both under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
• GP surgeries: NHS England Organisation Data Service (ODS), under the Open Government Licence v3.0. GP ratings: Care Quality Commission (CQC), under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
• Hospitals and some GP locations © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence (ODbL), via Geofabrik extracts.
• Base map: OpenFreeMap, using OpenMapTiles and © OpenStreetMap contributors.

The Open Government Licence v3.0 is available at nationalarchives.gov.uk.

Accessibility

Crime by Postcode is built to meet WCAG 2.2 level AA: it works with a keyboard and a screen reader, at any zoom, on any screen size. If anything is hard to use, tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.