Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government
English Indices of Deprivation (IMD)
Every neighbourhood in England ranked on deprivation — income, employment, education, health, crime, housing and living environment — for roughly 33,000 small areas. The standard way to describe the character of an area in one number.
At a glance
- Publisher
- Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government
- Updates
- Updated occasionally
- Cost
- Free — open data
- Last checked
- 2026-07-16
RetailPropertyHospitalityInsuranceFinancial servicesPeople & communities
What your business can use it for
- Market analysisUnderstand who lives around your sites — affluence, employment and health of each neighbourhood — and segment your patch on evidence rather than on assumptions about postcodes.
- Site selectionScreen candidate locations against the profile of the surrounding population, so your format matches the neighbourhood before you sign a lease.
- Risk assessmentAdd a well-understood, official measure of area character to any decision about credit, insurance or investment in a location.
Works with data you already have
- Customer, site or territory postcodesPostcodesPublished per LSOA; map your postcodes to LSOA with the free ONS postcode lookup, then join on the LSOA code
How to get it
- English indices of deprivation 2025 — spreadsheets and CSVsBulk downloadNo account needed. The 2025 edition, published 30 October 2025, replaces the 2019 indices. Includes the headline index, all seven domains, sub-domains and the child and older-people income measures.
What's involved in using it
- The information is spread across sixteen separate spreadsheets, each with multiple tabs, so getting the specific measures you want into one place means knowing which file and which sheet holds them.
- Everything is published for small statistical neighbourhoods of roughly 1,500 people each, not postcodes, so you need the free ONS postcode lookup to connect the deprivation of an area to your own customer or site list.
The technical detail, for whoever sets it up (4)
- It is a rank, not a score. Area A ranked twice as high as area B is not 'twice as deprived' — only the order is meaningful.
- England only. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland publish their own indices on different methods, so the four are not comparable.
- It measures the neighbourhood, not the household — deprived areas contain well-off people and vice versa. Never use it to judge an individual customer.
- Deprivation is relative: an area can genuinely improve and still fall in the rankings if others improved faster.
Ask us about English Indices of Deprivation (IMD)
Ask a factual question about English Indices of Deprivation (IMD) — 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.