ONS UPRN Directory: Unique Property Reference Numbers Linked to UK Geographies (May 2020)

The ONS UPRN Directory (ONSUD) for Great Britain as of May 2020 relates Unique Property Reference Numbers (UPRNs) from AddressBase® to statutory administrative, electoral, health, and other statistical geographies. ONS Geography produces this directory every 12 weeks to complement the Ordnance Survey AddressBase® product. The downloadable file is 464 MB in size.

Use Cases

• Link address-level data to administrative regions for analysis based on the UPRN-to-geography mapping.
• Enrich property records with electoral or health geography codes based on the described cross-referencing.
• Perform spatial joins between address points and higher-level statistical units based on the geospatial linkage.
• Standardize address identifiers across UK datasets using the authoritative UPRN reference.

Strengths

• Links each address to multiple current statutory geographies, including administrative, electoral, and health boundaries.
• Produced by the authoritative ONS Geography team and updated on a 12-week cycle.
• File size of 464 MB suggests a substantial dataset covering all of Great Britain.

Limitations

• Data is from May 2020; administrative boundaries and addresses may have changed since.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

Office for National Statistics (ONS) Geography, using Ordnance Survey AddressBase® data.

Collection Method

Official cross-referencing and linkage of address identifiers to geography codes.

Time Range

Snapshot as of May 2020.

Freshness

Updated every 12 weeks; snapshot is from May 2020.

Geography

Great Britain.