Postcode to Broad Rental Market Areas (BRMAs) Lookup v2.1 (2024)

This dataset is part of an existing series. First version: Urban Big Data Centre (2023). Postcode to Broad Rental Market Areas (BRMAs) Lookup [Data set]. University of Glasgow. This dataset is a lookup file linking unit postcodes to Broad Rental Market Area (BRMA) boundaries for Great Britainthe UK. BRMAs are the spatial areas used for the administration of Housing Benefit or Local Housing Allowance in Great Britain. There are 192 200 BRMAs in total.

BRMA boundaries were collected from publicly available datasets. For Great Britain, postcodes were linked to BRMAs using and linked to postcode centroids from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) postcode centroid lookups. For Northern Ireland, the lack of open postcode data required the use of a workaround. Full details on process here: https://github.com/nick-bailey/Postcode-to-BRMA-lookup.

This dataset is a lookup file linking unit postcodes to Broad Rental Market Area (BRMA) boundaries for Great Britain the UK. BRMAs are the spatial areas used for the administration of Housing Benefit or Local Housing Allowance in Great Britain. There are 192 200 BRMAs in total.

Collection process includes only open access data. In detail:

BRMA boundaries were collected from the following sources:

England: April 2014 version: Boswarva, Owen. (2017). Broad Rental Market Areas (England), [Dataset]. independent researcher. https://doi.org/10.7488/ds/1963 . Obtained using FOI. Open Government Licence.

Scotland: Boswarva, Owen. (2017). Broad Rental Market Areas (Scotland), [Dataset]. independent researcher. https://doi.org/10.7488/ds/1968. Obtained using FOI. Open Government Licence.

Wales: Boswarva, Owen. (2017). Broad Rental Market Areas (Wales), [Dataset]. independent researcher. https://doi.org/10.7488/ds/1965. Obtained using FOI. Open Government Licence.

Northern Ireland: no boundaries but uses list of postcode districts for each BRMA (https://www.nihe.gov.uk/housing-help/local-housing-allowance/current-lha-rent-levels)

For Great Britain, postcode centroids were collected from: https://geoportal.statistics.gov.uk/datasets/ons::nspl-online-latest-centroids/ (downloaded May 2024) Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0 Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right.

For Northern Ireland, to avoid using postcode data, we generated a list of every possible postcode and linked these with BRMAs using the NIHE list of postcode districts noted above.

Online open access sources (UK Government)