Data Sources & Methodology

Every dataset used on MapTools.uk comes from an official or well-established open data source. This page explains where the data comes from, how often it is updated, and any limitations you should be aware of.

Maps and Location Search

All map tiles come from OpenStreetMap (OSM), a collaborative mapping project maintained by volunteers worldwide. When you search for a place name or postcode, the query goes through our server-side proxy to Nominatim, OpenStreetMap's geocoding service. We use a proxy rather than calling Nominatim directly from your browser because their usage policy requires proper User-Agent headers.

We do not log or store search queries that pass through this proxy.

Drive Time and Routing

The road network used by the Drive Time Map also comes from OpenStreetMap, used under the Open Database Licence (ODbL). OSM data covers every motorway, A-road, B-road, residential street, and lane in the UK, along with one-way restrictions, turn limits, and access rules.

Routing is computed using OSRM (Open Source Routing Machine), self-hosted by MapTools.uk. Drive time areas are generated by sampling journeys outwards from your start point and finding the boundary at which travel time hits your chosen value. Speeds are based on the road type tagged in OSM (typical free-flowing speeds, not live traffic or posted limits). Routes using ferries include the crossing itself but not waiting or check-in time, so allow extra time after a crossing. See the Drive Time Map guide for a full explanation of how the calculation works and what it does and doesn't account for.

UK Postcode Data

Postcode locations come from the freemaptools UK postcode latitude/longitude dataset, which is derived from Office for National Statistics data and published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The raw dataset maps every UK postcode to a latitude and longitude. We process this into individual JSON files grouped by outward code (the first part of the postcode, e.g. "SW1A"), so the browser only needs to load the relevant file rather than the entire national dataset.

Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2021
Contains Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right 2021
Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0

This data covers all current postcodes in England, Scotland and Wales. Terminated postcodes are not included, and very newly created postcodes may take time to appear.

Northern Ireland is not covered. Postcode location data for Northern Ireland is licensed separately from the rest of the UK and is not available under an open licence, so BT postcodes are not included. We would like to support them and will revisit if the licensing changes.

Crime Statistics

Crime data comes from data.police.uk, the official open data portal run by the Home Office. This covers police-recorded crime in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Police Scotland does not publish data to this service, so only British Transport Police crimes (at train stations) are available for Scottish locations.

Update frequency: Police.uk publishes new data monthly, typically with a two-month delay. We download and process the latest data weekly.

Location accuracy: To protect victims, crime locations are anonymised by the police. Each crime is snapped to a nearby map point rather than the exact address where it occurred. This means "on or near" is as precise as the data gets.

Limitations: Not all crimes are reported or recorded. The data shows police-recorded crime, which is only a subset of all crime that actually takes place. Crime levels should be treated as a rough guide, not a precise measurement of safety.

Flood Risk

Flood risk ratings come from the Environment Agency's "Risk of Flooding from Rivers and Sea - Postcodes in Areas at Risk" dataset, published as open data on data.gov.uk. Our copy is the Environment Agency's release of 18 June 2026, from its current national flood risk assessment. The data counts the properties in each postcode in each risk band; we show one band per postcode, the highest band any home in it is in (for a postcode with no homes, the highest band of any other building). The official GOV.UK long-term flood risk service shows the risk around a single address and also covers surface water, so its result can differ from ours.

Update frequency: The Environment Agency says it plans to update this data about every three months. We downloaded our copy on 8 October 2026; a script rebuilds it from the EA's download, but it is run by hand, not on a schedule.

Where it covers: England only. The Environment Agency's data does not cover Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland, and the tool shows a postcode there (or in the Isle of Man or Channel Islands) as not covered, with a link to Natural Resources Wales, SEPA or Flood Maps NI where one exists. Which country a postcode is in comes from the ONS Postcode Directory (May 2026), postcode by postcode, since some postcode districts cross the England-Wales and England-Scotland borders.

What it covers: Risk from rivers (fluvial flooding) and the sea (coastal flooding). It does not cover surface water flooding, groundwater flooding, or sewer flooding. For a complete picture, the GOV.UK long-term flood risk service covers all flood types.

Risk categories: Each location is rated as High (1 in 30 or greater annual chance), Medium (between 1 in 100 and 1 in 30), Low (between 1 in 1000 and 1 in 100), or Very Low (less than 1 in 1000). A postcode in England that is not in the dataset has no identified significant flood risk from rivers or sea in our copy of the data.

Schools and Exam Results

England

English school data comes from two Department for Education (DfE) sources:

• Get Information About Schools (GIAS) provides the register of all schools in England, including name, address, type, age range, religious character, and Ofsted rating.
• School performance tables provide KS2 SATs results for primary schools and GCSE results for secondary schools, including Attainment 8, Progress 8, and the percentage of pupils achieving grade 5 or above in English and Maths.

Update frequency: School performance data is published annually, typically in the autumn. We rebuild our dataset from time to time rather than continuously. Our Ofsted data covers inspections up to September 2025, so a school inspected since then still shows its earlier result, and the report cards Ofsted has published since November 2025 are not included yet. The link to its Ofsted reports always has the latest.

Scotland

Scottish school data comes from two Scottish Government sources:

• School contact details provides the register of all publicly funded schools in Scotland, including name, address, type, and denomination.
• Education Scotland (HMIE) inspection grades are included where available, using the six-point scale from Excellent to Unsatisfactory.

Update frequency: School contact details are updated termly by the Scottish Government. HMIE inspection data is sourced from published FOI releases.

Coverage: England and Scotland. Wales and Northern Ireland have separate education systems and are not currently included. National averages shown for English schools are calculated from the published DfE data.

Food Hygiene Ratings

Food hygiene ratings come from the Food Standards Agency (FSA) open data API. This covers restaurants, takeaways, pubs, cafes, supermarkets, and other food businesses in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Food Standards Scotland operates a separate scheme for Scottish businesses.

Update frequency: The FSA API reflects the latest published ratings. We refresh our data regularly to capture new inspections and rating changes.

How ratings work: Local authority food safety officers inspect businesses and rate them from 0 (urgent improvement required) to 5 (very good). The rating reflects standards at the time of inspection. Businesses can request a re-inspection if they have made improvements.

Fuel Prices

Fuel price and forecourt data comes from Fuel Finder, the UK Government's mandatory fuel price transparency scheme (Motor Fuel Price (Open Data) Regulations 2025), covering major and independent retailers across the whole of Great Britain including Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda, Morrisons, BP, Shell, Esso and Texaco. It contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Update frequency: Retailers must report a price change to Fuel Finder within 30 minutes. We download the latest data every morning.

Limitations: Only retailers participating in the government scheme are included. Independent stations, smaller chains, and many local garages do not provide data to this scheme and will not appear in our results. There may also be a short delay between a price change at the pump and the data feed updating.

EV Charging Stations

EV charging station data comes from Open Charge Map (OCM), a community-maintained open data registry of electric vehicle charging locations worldwide. The data is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

Update frequency: We periodically re-download the full UK dataset. Because the data is community-maintained, some entries may be outdated if a charger has been removed or had its details changed.

Coverage: Over 32,000 charging locations across the UK, including all major networks (BP Pulse, Pod Point, Tesla, Osprey, InstaVolt, GRIDSERVE, and many others) as well as smaller independent chargers.

Limitations: Real-time availability is not shown. Chargers may be temporarily out of service, occupied, or have restricted access. Always check the relevant network's app for live status before travelling to a charger.

Public Toilets

Toilet locations come from the Great British Public Toilet Map, a community-maintained dataset of public toilet facilities across the UK. The data includes opening hours, accessibility information, baby changing facilities, and whether the toilet requires payment or a RADAR key.

Licence: Contains data from the Toilet Map, licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Update frequency: We download the full dataset every week, on Sunday morning. Because the data is community-maintained, some entries may be outdated if a facility has closed or changed its hours.

Our corrections: Where a council publishes that one of its toilets has closed, opens only for events, or keeps different hours, we apply that correction on top of each weekly download, and keep a record of the council page and the date we read it. A closed toilet is removed from the map; an events-only toilet is shown with a note. We also read each record's own notes: a toilet whose notes say it has been closed for over a year, for years or since covid is removed, and one whose notes say it is closed without saying for how long, or may be closed, is shown with the label "May be closed: check before travelling", as is one closed temporarily whose record has not been updated since 2023 or whose stated reopening date has not yet arrived.

Reporting a problem: Every toilet in the finder has a "Something wrong? Update it on the Toilet Map" link to its own entry on the Great British Public Toilet Map, where anyone can correct it. Corrections made there reach our map within a week. You can also tell us.

Changing Places toilets: The toilet data has no Changing Places field, and we have not found a list of Changing Places toilets that we are allowed to reuse, so the finder does not mark them. The Changing Places consortium's own toilet map lists them.

Dark Sky Discovery Sites

Dark sky site locations come from the Dark Sky Discovery programme, a UK partnership that registers and classifies locations suitable for stargazing. Sites are categorised as Milky Way class (the darkest sites where the Milky Way is visible), Orion class (sites dark enough to clearly see the constellation Orion), Dark Sky Parks (internationally designated reserves), and associated sites (observatories and event venues).

Update frequency: Site data is updated periodically as new locations are registered with the Dark Sky Discovery programme.

The light pollution map overlay uses 2024 VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) satellite night lights processed by the Earth Observation Group, Colorado School of Mines, and modelled into a light pollution atlas by David Lorenz. VIIRS is a sensor on NASA/NOAA weather satellites that measures artificial light emissions from the Earth's surface at night. The data is colour-coded by sky brightness, shown as Lorenz's light pollution zones, which are not Bortle classes (he asks that they not be conflated).

Sunrise, Sunset and Daylight

Sunrise and sunset times are calculated, not downloaded. The Sunrise & Sunset tool and the winter daylight table both use the equations behind the NOAA Solar Calculator: the tool in your browser for any place and date, the table computed once. The table's method section explains the definitions and accuracy. The tool's sun direction and moon figures come from the open-source SunCalc library.

The town names, positions and populations in the winter daylight table come from GeoNames, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. The list was checked against Ordnance Survey Open Names and the Office for National Statistics' 2011 Census built-up area figures, and a number of towns the main source would have missed were added using those two sources and Wikidata; the table's method section says what was changed. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026. Contains public sector information from the Office for National Statistics, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

How We Process the Data

All datasets are downloaded by server-side scripts and converted into static JSON files. These files are served directly to your browser as part of the website. There is no database and no live API queries when you use most tools.

This approach has two advantages. First, it is fast. Your browser loads a small JSON file rather than waiting for a server to query a database. Second, it is reliable. The tools continue to work even if the original data source is temporarily unavailable.

The trade-off is that data is only as fresh as our last update. For time-sensitive information like active flood warnings or current fuel prices, we recommend checking the original source as well.

Corrections and Feedback

If you spot incorrect data or have questions about our sources, please get in touch. We take data accuracy seriously and will investigate any issues raised.