Frequently asked questions.

Every area gets a score from 0–100 on nine things that shape daily life: affordability, safety, weather, green space, amenities, commute, education, environment, and health & wellbeing. The overall score is a straight average of those nine: we don’t secretly weight any of them higher. If one dimension matters more to you, use Find My Match to reweight them yourself.

100 means "among the best in the UK on this measure"; 0 means "among the worst". We set the top end at the 5th-best percentile of areas nationally, and the bottom end at the 95th, so a handful of extreme outliers can’t stretch the scale and make every other area look average.

Every metric is from a named public source: ONS, Land Registry, Ofsted, NHS Digital, the Home Office, DEFRA, the Met Office, Police UK, OpenStreetMap and others. No survey data, no proprietary panels. You can see the specific source on every metric shown on an area page, and the full list lives on our Data Sources page.

Scores are rebuilt monthly from the latest published figures. Some sources update monthly (house prices, rent, unemployment), others quarterly (crime, GP data), others annually (salary, council tax, Ofsted). Weather is a 30-year average and doesn’t change year to year.

All of England, Scotland, and Wales: 335 Local Authority Districts, around 720 towns, and roughly 2,500 postcode districts. Northern Ireland isn’t currently covered because several of our sources (Ofsted, NHS Digital, Environment Agency flood data) don’t publish Northern Ireland equivalents we can use consistently.

Some data, such as salaries, rents, Ofsted ratings, and broadband, is only published at council level. For towns and postcode districts we inherit those numbers from the parent council rather than invent finer-grained figures. We label which metrics are inherited on every page, so it’s obvious what’s local and what isn’t.

For councils we use Home Office recorded-crime totals, the most complete national figure. For towns and postcode districts we use Police UK street-level data within roughly a mile of the centre. Both are expressed per 1,000 residents, which is why a big city with lots of crime can still score better than a small town with fewer but relatively more incidents.

No, and we say so on the page. DEFRA stopped publishing comparable council-level noise data in 2026, so we estimate exposure from distance to motorways, railway stations, airports, and population density. It’s a proxy, useful for comparison but not a decibel reading.

No. Browsing, comparing, and using the cost-of-living calculator all work without signing in. An account only adds saving favourites, writing reviews, personalised scoring weights, and alerts when an area you follow changes.

Yes. Find My Match lets you set your own weighting across the nine dimensions (e.g. commute matters twice as much as weather), and the site re-ranks every area to your priorities.

Scores are a starting point, not a verdict. Shortlist five or six areas using the map or match quiz, then dig into the full area page: the highlights, cautions, and postcode-district breakdown tell you why an area scored the way it did. Visit in person before you commit. No dataset can tell you whether you’ll like the local pub.

Yes, please do. Use the Contact page to flag specific data or scoring issues. We refresh data monthly, so if a source updates, the next pipeline run picks it up. If the issue is with our scoring logic rather than the underlying data, we’d like to hear that too.