Office for National Statistics
Census 2021 (England & Wales)
The full demographic picture of every neighbourhood in England and Wales, taken on Census Day in March 2021 — age, ethnicity, health, housing, work, qualifications and household make-up, for areas as small as a single street. The definitive account of who lives where.
At a glance
- Publisher
- Office for National Statistics
- Updates
- One-off publication
- Cost
- Free — open data
- Last checked
- 2026-07-21
RetailPropertyHospitalityInsuranceProfessional & B2B servicesPeople & communities
What your business can use it for
- Market analysisProfile the people around each of your sites — age, affluence, housing, cars, languages, qualifications — and understand your catchment on official evidence rather than assumption.
- Site selectionMatch a candidate location to the population it would serve, so your format fits the neighbourhood before you sign a lease.
- Territory planningSize and carve up sales patches on the actual make-up of each area — how many households of the right type really sit there — before you put a rep or a van in it.
Works with data you already have
- Customer, site or territory postcodesPostcodesPublished per census area (OA/LSOA/MSOA/LAD), not per postcode — map your postcodes to the area with the free ONS postcode lookup, then join on the area code
How to get it
- Census 2021 bulk data — all topic summary tables (Nomis)Bulk downloadNo account needed. 76 topic tables, each supplied for several area sizes from whole-street up to local authority. Download only the table and area size you need — the finest, street-level files are large.
What's involved in using it
- It isn't one file. Each of the 76 topics — age, ethnicity, health, housing and the rest — is a separate download, and each comes at several area sizes, so you pick out and combine only the pieces you actually need.
- The most detailed, street-level files are very large, so working at that level takes real handling rather than a quick open in a spreadsheet.
- Matching it to your own postcodes needs a separate step through the free ONS postcode-to-area lookup, because it is published for small areas of roughly 1,500 people, not for postcodes.
The technical detail, for whoever sets it up (5)
- England and Wales only. Scotland (National Records of Scotland) and Northern Ireland (NISRA) run their own censuses on slightly different questions, so the figures are not directly comparable across the four nations.
- It is a single snapshot of March 2021, not a live figure — ages drift as years pass, and the count does not update between censuses. Pair it with the yearly Population estimates when you need a current headcount.
- That date fell during a Covid lockdown. Answers about travel to work, second addresses and where students were living reflect lockdown conditions, not a normal year — treat those tables with care.
- Areas use 2021 boundaries. To join anything built on the older 2011 areas (some earlier datasets), use the free ONS 2011-to-2021 change lookup first.
- For health comparisons across areas, use the age-standardised tables rather than raw counts — otherwise an older area looks unhealthier simply because it is older.
Ask us about Census 2021 (England & Wales)
Ask a factual question about Census 2021 (England & Wales) — what it covers, how often it changes, whether it matches the records you keep — and we will answer, free. Or tell us what you are trying to work out, and we will tell you what it would take to get this data working next to the numbers you already have.