Hi - we love this data and use it at work. However, there is some reluctance to rely on it without understanding the methodology you use. Looking at the raw ONS data, I can see you have lots of lookups and renames... are you able to share your steps please, so that we can recreate if ever we lose direct access. (I work for a charity, and we would not use for any commercial activities). Thank you

Hi Clare, yes, most of the data is from the ONS Postcode Directory and I'm just re-arranging into a hopefully more useful structure. The lookups are fairly straightforward, get the ID and find the name in the relevant lookup file. I think the only other things I do with the data are adjusting counties so they match up to what people are expecting rather than county councils and converting Irish grid references to GB grid references, but if there's something I've forgotten let me know and I can provide more info

Hi Chris,
Congrats from me as well for your incredible efforts.
As you're obviously an expert on postcodes, I have a related question. Is it at all possible, that there are two streets with identical names in different locations within the same postcode? I'm asking because of a dispute with a delivery company. Many thanks,
Dirk

I guess it's possible but it seems incredibly unlikely that
- the local council would name two streets identically that are close together (similar names sure, we live in a street with several similarly named streets nearby and our post sometimes goes to the wrong street even though they have different postcodes). And if that had happened historically, I'd imagine the council would change the name of one of the streets
- if there were two streets close together with the same name, that the Royal Mail would assign the same postcode to both of them
If you look at the page for the postcode with the problem and click on the UPRN link, you can see all the properties in that postcode which might give you a clue what's happening

Hi Chris,

Excellent resource, thank you very much. One question though - how to do you calculate the population and number of households? Only, I've checked the ONS's most recent update and I can't find that data mentioned?

Thanks!

Sorry, this disappeared into Disqus's spam list. Population and household data comes from the census. For 2011, this was available by postcode but it is no longer as granular for 2021 (and the 2011 data isn't available at that level either, due to GDPR I'm guessing), so some of the data is from 2011, some from 2021. Hopefully I've generally listed the year, although I notice I haven't on this page

Just wanted to say: thank you for this incredible public service!
If I could make a suggestion: would be great to see 3x date fields above the table 1.) date of last update 2.) postcode data date 3.) population data date.

Hi. Repeating all the comments about how useful this is. Thank you so much. I have noticed that Isle of Man data is missing in the CSV downloads. Have I missed something?

Unfortunately the Isle of Man data isn't freely available so isn't included

Hi - this data is absolutely awesome! I was wondering how the postcodes mapped to UK counties? I'm trying to generate a list of postcodes by county & I can't seem to put it together or find anything online which I can use as a key. Any help or point in the right direction would be awesome :D thanks (EDIT: By postcode I mean the shortened version as shown in the table above)

EDIT2: I found the data I needed! You had this in your download spage: https://www.doogal.co.uk/Po... under the overview section. Thank you so much :D Can't say how great this is as a resource :)

Good to hear!

This is a great resource. Just one question though - how are you calculating the elevation on a per postcode basis?

I'm using an elevation web service to calculate it for the lat/long of the postcode (the Quality field indicates what is used for that lat/long)

This is an amazing resource - again thank you.

Hi, I wanted to confirm if this data is free to use for work (as there are copiright references at the bottom). Also, would you have anything remotely similar for Ireland?

Yes, it's all free to use. If you want to republish the data somewhere else you'll need to include the copyright information.
Last time I looked the data for Ireland wasn't freely available or redistributable

Thanks for the feedback, and congrats on the hard work :)

Hi - I'm the techie for a county-wide neighbourhood watch association, and have been looking at this brilliant resource to get an up-to-the-minute listing of the grid refs of all current postcodes in four postcode areas, amounting to some 70,000 records. Downloading a CSV to a local machine isn't really convenient - especially one which is hundreds of megabytes in size, and contains dozens of fields I don't need - so I've written an experimental screen-scraping program in PHP which extracts the data I require directly from the text returned from a URL request on your search facility. It does work, but unfortunately, even at 200 records per page, the 470-odd pages take almost two minutes to acquire - 99% of this is accessing the data from your server. I'm concious that it probably throttles your system to death, and I don't want to be banned! If I only require current postcodes from four fixed postcode areas with their latitude and longitude figures, is there a better way of doing this? TIA. :-)

Hi Graham
You could try this page
https://www.doogal.co.uk/Mu...
Construct the list of postcodes you're interested in and then download them in the format you require. You can reuse that link to download them when they are updated, although that only happens every 3 months

Ah yes, that works, thank you. It's a manageable size (<10M), and a PHP routine will take care of extracting what I need in a couple of seconds. Your site is more up-to-date than a couple of others I've looked at (freemaptools and townscountiespostcodes), which are missing 250+ postcodes which your data says have been around for up to 6 months! Do you have an updating schedule, so I can get the latest list as soon as it appears?

The ONS data comes out in Feb, May, Aug and Nov, but the date in the month seems fairly random. I post on my blog and Twitter when I've spotted their new data and updated the site

OK - a data dump on 1st day of each of the following months should be good enough. That's brilliant. Keep up the good work!

thank you for the polygon kml file which I used to create this postcode district boundary map of Great Britain https://www.google.com/maps... I have credited you and provided a link back to here in the map description

Very nice! Impressed that Google Maps can cope with that file, it's quite a monster file. Would you like a link from here to it?