What the terms mean
Plain-English definitions of everything on the site. Anywhere you see a term? with a small question mark, it links here. Nothing on this page is opinion — it just explains how the official figures work and what they do and don't tell you.
Area Score
A single 0–100 figure for each neighbourhood, where 100 = least deprived in England and 0 = most deprived. It's our relabelling of the official Index of Multiple Deprivation, rescaled to a national percentile so it's easy to compare. It measures relative deprivation — not affluence, house prices, or how nice a place feels to you personally.
Deprivation
A government measure of disadvantage across several aspects of life — income, employment, education, health, crime, housing and the local environment. “More deprived” means more people in the area experience these disadvantages. It is about the area as a whole, not any individual living there.
Indices of Deprivation (IoD2025)
The official English dataset, published by the government (MHCLG), that ranks every small area in England by deprivation. The 2025 release is the most recent. It is updated only every few years, so it changes slowly. Our Area Score is derived directly from it.
Neighbourhood (MSOA)
The geographic unit each page covers. MSOA stands for Middle-layer Super Output Area — an official statistical neighbourhood of roughly 7,000 people. We label them with the friendly names used by the House of Commons Library rather than their codes.
LSOA
A Lower-layer Super Output Area — a smaller official unit of about 1,500 people. The deprivation data is published at LSOA level; we combine several LSOAs (weighted by population) to build each neighbourhood (MSOA) score.
Percentile
Your position in a national ranking, expressed out of 100. Being in the 90th percentile means the area scores higher than 90% of neighbourhoods in England. We use percentiles so a score is always relative to the rest of the country.
Themed scores
Seven sub-scores behind the headline Area Score: Income, Employment, Education, Health, Crime, Housing & access, and Living environment. Each is on the same 0–100 scale, so you can see why an area scores as it does, not just the overall number.
Median price
The middle sale price over the last 12 months: half of homes sold for more, half for less. We use the median rather than the average because a single very expensive sale can badly skew an average in a small area.
1, 5 & 10-year change
How the median price has moved over time, comparing like-for-like 12-month windows. A 5-year change of +20% means the typical home costs a fifth more than five years ago. In small areas these figures can jump around, so treat them as direction of travel, not precision.
Sample size (n)
The number of sales a figure is based on. A median from n=80 sales is far more reliable than one from n=4. We always show it so you can judge for yourself.
Suppressed / too few sales
Where an area has too few sales to give a trustworthy figure (fewer than 10 overall, or 5 for a property type), we don't guess — we hide the number and show the wider local-authority figure instead. “Too few sales to report” means exactly that.
Affordability-adjusted Score
A derived 0–100 score that combines two things: the area's Area Score (how un-deprived it is, nationally) and how affordable its homes are nationally (cheapest areas score highest). We combine them with a geometric mean, which rewards areas that do well on both — a less-deprived place with cheaper-than-average houses scores highly; a place that is only good on one side does not. It answers “where can I find a relatively un-deprived area without paying top prices?” Two honest limits: “affordable” means cheap in national terms, not relative to local wages (that needs income data we don't yet include); and an area can look cheap simply because it has more flats or smaller homes. It is orientation, not investment advice.