About this map
Every neighbourhood in England, ranked from most to least deprived, using the official English Indices of Deprivation 2025.
England is divided into 33,755 Lower-layer Super Output Areas — statistical neighbourhoods of roughly 1,500 people. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government scores each one against 39 indicators and publishes a single national ranking. That ranking drives funding formulas, research, journalism and planning decisions across the country, but it is usually distributed as a spreadsheet of 33,755 rows. This map turns it back into geography.
Using the map
- Search a postcode to jump to the neighbourhood containing it. The panel shows that area's national rank out of 33,755 and its decile.
- Filter by decile to isolate part of the distribution. Showing only deciles 1 and 2 — the most deprived fifth of England — makes the geography of concentrated disadvantage immediately obvious in a way the full colour ramp does not.
- Click any area for its composite rank and the individual domain ranks behind it. The domain breakdown is far more useful than the headline number: two areas with identical overall ranks can be driven by completely different factors.
- Use the top and bottom lists to rank areas within your current view, which is usually more informative than the national extremes.
What the colours mean
Areas are shaded by decile. The ranked list is cut into ten equal groups of about 3,375 neighbourhoods: decile 1 is the most deprived tenth of England, decile 10 the least deprived tenth.
Because each decile holds exactly a tenth of all areas, the boundaries between colours are statistical conveniences rather than meaningful thresholds. Two neighbourhoods either side of a colour change can be effectively identical. When you care about a specific place rather than the national pattern, read the underlying rank in the popup rather than the colour.
Three things the index does not tell you
- It is relative, not absolute. An area can improve in real terms and still fall in the rankings if other areas improved faster. A change in rank between releases says nothing on its own about whether conditions there got better or worse.
- It describes areas, not households. A decile 1 neighbourhood has a higher concentration of deprived households, not a uniform population. Deprived households in comfortable areas are numerous and invisible here.
- It understates rural deprivation. Dispersed disadvantage averages out within a statistical neighbourhood, so sparse rural areas score better than lived experience suggests.
Where the data comes from
Index values are the official English Indices of Deprivation 2025 published by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Boundary geometry contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right. Postcode lookup is served by the open postcodes.io API.
This is an independent tool and is not endorsed by or affiliated with any government department. If you think a figure is wrong, tell us.
Read more
Our full guide covers the seven domains and their weights, the IDACI and IDAOPI sub-indices, and the limitations worth stating whenever you cite this dataset.