About MapTools.uk

MapTools.uk is a collection of free mapping tools built for people in the UK. Every tool on the site is designed to solve a specific, practical problem, whether that's planning a delivery route, checking flood risk before buying a house, or finding the nearest public toilet. The site draws on government and open data, covering over 15,000 public toilets, over 22,000 schools, over 8,000 fuel stations and the hygiene ratings of over 580,000 food businesses.

Why We Built This

Most mapping tools online are either locked behind sign-ups, limited by daily usage caps, or designed for a US audience. We wanted something different. MapTools.uk is built from the ground up for UK postcodes, UK data, and UK users. All our mapping tools are free, with no sign-up. The free route optimiser plans up to 100 stops at a time, and the two tools that use our own routing server, road distances in Distance Between and the Drive Time Map, allow 30 a day each. For delivery drivers we also offer Route Planner Pro, from £5 a month with a 7-day free trial, which adds real road-distance routing, stop-by-stop navigation and saved routes. For businesses with several drivers, Route Planner Teams plans the day across the team and sends each driver their stops, at £9 per driver per month with a 14-day free trial.

The site is funded by advertising, which means we can keep everything free without asking for your email address or credit card details.

What We Offer

The site has 26 free tools, each focused on a different mapping task:

• Route Optimiser - Paste a list of postcodes and get the fastest order to visit them all. Used by delivery drivers, couriers, and field engineers across the UK.
• Radius Map - Draw circles on a map to visualise catchment areas, delivery zones, or travel distances. Upload a CSV to see which locations fall inside or outside.
• Measure Distance and Distance Between - Measure routes by clicking on a map, or get the straight-line distance between two places.
• Area Calculator - Draw shapes on a map and get the area in square metres, hectares, or acres.
• Nearest Postcodes - Find the closest postcodes to any UK location, ranked by distance.
• Flood Risk Checker - Look up the Environment Agency's flood risk rating for any postcode in England.
• Crime Checker - See recent crime data from Police.uk for any area in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
• School Finder - Find nearby schools with Ofsted ratings and SATs/GCSE results from the Department for Education.
• Fuel Prices - Compare petrol and diesel prices at stations near you using government open data.
• Food Hygiene Checker - Check food hygiene ratings from the Food Standards Agency for restaurants and takeaways.
• Toilet Finder - Locate public toilets nearby, with filters for accessibility, baby changing, and free entry.
• Drive Time Map - See how far you can drive in a set time from any start point, worked out on real roads.
• Postcode Mapper, Postcode Converter and Postcode Distance - Plot a list of postcodes, convert postcodes to latitude and longitude, or measure between postcodes in bulk.
• Postcode Areas, Counties & Councils, Parliamentary Constituencies and London Boroughs - Boundary maps you can search by postcode and export.
• Territory Mapper - Split the country into sales or delivery territories from a list of bases.
• EV Charging Finder - Find charge points near you, with connector types and networks.
• Sunrise & Sunset, Light Pollution Map, Elevation Finder and Holiday Weather Map - Daylight times, sky brightness and dark sky sites, height above sea level, and typical holiday weather.

Where Our Data Comes From

We use official, publicly available datasets wherever possible. This includes:

• Maps and geocoding - OpenStreetMap via Nominatim
• Crime statistics - Police.uk open data (England, Wales, and Northern Ireland)
• Flood risk - Environment Agency "Risk of Flooding from Rivers and Sea" postcode data (England only; the EA's June 2026 release)
• Schools and results - Department for Education's Get Information About Schools (GIAS) and school performance tables
• Food hygiene ratings - Food Standards Agency (FSA) open data API
• Fuel prices - Fuel Finder, the UK Government's mandatory fuel price transparency scheme
• Public toilets - Great British Public Toilet Map community dataset
• UK postcodes - A postcode dataset derived from Office for National Statistics data (England, Scotland and Wales), processed into per-outcode lookup files
• Boundaries - The ONS Postcode Directory, the ONS Open Geography Portal and Ordnance Survey Boundary-Line
• Drive times and road distances - Our own routing server (OSRM) on OpenStreetMap roads
• EV charge points - Open Charge Map community data
• Dark skies - The Dark Sky Discovery programme's sites, and David Lorenz's light pollution atlas from VIIRS satellite data
• Elevation - Ordnance Survey Terrain 50 in Great Britain, Copernicus DEM elsewhere
• Holiday weather - The Copernicus Climate Change Service's ERA5 reanalysis

We update these datasets regularly. Fuel prices are refreshed daily, crime data is updated monthly, and school data is updated each academic year. For details on how each dataset is processed and how often it refreshes, see our Data Sources page.

Last updated: October 2026

Privacy First

Our free tools: we don't store what you put into them. Some tools look up postcodes and place names through an external service; each tool says so. Route Planner Pro and Route Planner Teams, our paid subscriptions, are the exception: they store the routes, jobs and proof-of-delivery evidence you save to your account. How we handle that is set out in our Privacy Policy.

Place-name searches go through our own proxy to OpenStreetMap's Nominatim service, as Nominatim's usage policy requires; we do not log them. Road distances and drive times are worked out on our own routing server; how their daily limits work is in our Privacy Policy.

We use Google Analytics to understand which tools are popular and Google AdSense to fund the site. Both are covered in our Privacy Policy. We do not sell data and we do not build user profiles.

How It's Built

The free tools are a static website with no database - the site is built with Astro, uses Leaflet for interactive maps on our own basemap made from OpenStreetMap data, and the free-tool logic is plain JavaScript that runs in your browser. A few small server functions help some tools: place-name search, elevation, road distances and drive times. Route Planner Pro adds the parts a subscription needs: a sign-in and user accounts system, a database for the routes and delivery proof you save, and a small API backend to serve them. Those run on Cloudflare; details are in our Privacy Policy.

The static data files (postcodes, school data, toilet locations, flood risk ratings) are pre-processed from their original sources and served as JSON files. This means the tools load quickly. Some also read an outside service while you use them: the Crime Checker reads Police.uk's data service, the Light Pollution Map's overlay comes from David Lorenz's map, and the Elevation Finder uses Open-Meteo and OpenTopoData for some lookups.

Who Built This

MapTools.uk is built and maintained by Dan, a UK-based developer. The site started in 2025 as a side project to create genuinely useful, privacy-respecting mapping tools that work well with UK postcodes and government data. Every tool is designed, coded, and tested by hand - this is not an auto-generated directory site.

Get in Touch

If you have feedback, a bug report, or a suggestion for a new tool, we would genuinely like to hear from you. Visit our contact page to send us a message. We typically reply within two business days.

You can also browse our tools page to explore everything we offer.