Index of Multiple Deprivation Postcodes

by Craig Russell data

Hello,

One of the most important metrics for social impact investors is the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD). This is a measure of relative deprivation for small areas in the UK, but working with this data can be quite tricky.

IMD ranks score areas by a range of measures to indicate which areas are more (or less) deprived than others, with lower ranks indicating higher deprivation. As different nations use different methodologies, the ranks are not directly comparable.

There is no overall IMD ranking for the UK, as responsibility for measuring and reporting this data is devolved to the four nations. These are published roughly every 5 years.

The latest available figures are:

The scores are produced for "lower-layer super output areas" (LSOAs), which are small areas of around 1,500 people.

Outside of government, LSOAs are not widely used. Governments do provide data files for mapping postcodes to LSOA codes. Analysis requires finding the LSOA code for a given address, and then joining this to IMD data sets for each of the four nations.

To make this easier, I've produced a single datafile that maps postcodes to IMD scores. The data is available in CSV format. You can download it here:

Download Postcode to IMD Ranks CSV (ZIP 9.8MB)

The data file has the following columns:

  • postcode - the postcode in uppercase with no spaces
  • lsoa_code - the LSOA code
  • lsoa_name - the LSOA name
  • la_code - the local authority code (useful for joining to other data)
  • la_name - the local authority name
  • nation - 'England', 'Scotland', 'Wales', or 'Northern Ireland'
  • eng_imd_rank - the IMD rank for England
  • eng_imd_decile - the decile for the England IMD rank
  • scot_imd_rank - the IMD rank for Scotland
  • scot_imd_decile - the decile for the Scotland IMD rank
  • wal_imd_rank - the IMD rank for Wales
  • wal_imd_decile - the decile for the Wales IMD rank
  • ni_imd_rank - the IMD rank for Northern Ireland See NOTE below
  • ni_imd_decile - the decile for the Northern Ireland IMD rank See NOTE below

The file contains 2.6 million postcodes, and is correct as of May 2022 (the latest available). Some postcodes may contain blank IMD values as they cannot be matched to the latest IMD data.

NOTE: The data file does not contain postcodes or IMD data for Northern Ireland, as use of NI postcodes are restricted by licence.

I will be incorporating IMD measures into ImpactGo in the future, so if you have any questions or suggestions, please reach out to me at craig.russell@impactgo.uk.

Take care 👋

Craig