MSOA (2021) to Counties and Unitary Authority (April 2025) Best Fit Lookup in EW

A best fit lookup table mapping 2021 Middle Layer Super Output Areas (MSOAs) to Counties and Unitary Authorities in England and Wales as of April 2025. The dataset is provided by the Office for National Statistics and was last updated on the platform in May 2026. It contains six text fields for area codes and names in English and Welsh.

Use Cases

• Aggregating MSOA-level statistics to county/unitary authority level based on the best fit mapping.
• Joining demographic or economic data from different sources using the provided MSOA and CTYUA codes.
• Creating visualizations or reports for local government areas in England and Wales using the named boundaries.
• Validating or standardizing geographic identifiers in datasets covering England and Wales.

Strengths

• Provides a direct, official mapping between two important UK statistical geographies (2021 MSOAs and 2025 Counties/Unitary Authorities).
• Includes both English and Welsh language name fields (MSOA21NMW, CTYUA25NMW) for bilingual support.
• Sourced from the authoritative Office for National Statistics, ensuring reliability for official statistics.

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale joins.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to its coverage of only England and Wales.

Provenance

Source

Office for National Statistics

Collection Method

Likely an official administrative compilation or statistical product.

Time Range

Reference dates: MSOAs from 2021, Counties/Unitary Authorities as of 1st April 2025.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-06 17:03:03.443013; freshness should be verified

Geography

England and Wales