Research Methodology

Source

All figures come from the Food Standards Agency’s public ratings API at api.ratings.food.gov.uk, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. We take a snapshot rather than querying live, so every page across this site quotes the same numbers from the same moment. The current snapshot was captured on 2026-07-10.

Sample

For each of the 20 cities we cover, we retrieve every establishment within 5 miles of the city centre coordinates. A radius, rather than a council boundary, because operators trade in a city rather than in a local authority: a restaurant a mile outside the Bristol boundary competes with the ones inside it. The consequence is that a city’s figures can include neighbouring authorities, and the busiest cities overlap slightly with their commuter towns.

A radius also catches strays. Mobile caterers are registered with the council that licensed them, not the one they trade in, so a van registered in Croydon can sit inside five miles of Bristol city centre. Where we name the councils behind a city’s figures, we list only those contributing at least 1% of its establishments and report the rest as a count. The strays remain in the totals, where a single business among thousands cannot move an average.

Business types

We include only the FSA business types that describe hospitality:

• Restaurant/Cafe/Canteen
• Pub/bar/nightclub
• Hotel/bed & breakfast/guest house
• Takeaway/sandwich shop
• Other catering premises
• Mobile caterer

Retailers, manufacturers, distributors, importers, farmers, schools and hospitals are excluded. They are inspected under the same scheme but they are not the businesses we advise, and including them would move every average.

Two schemes, never mixed

England, Wales and Northern Ireland use the Food Hygiene Rating Scheme, which scores a business from 0 to 5. Scotland uses the Food Hygiene Information Scheme, which records a pass, a pass with the Eat Safe award, or improvement required. There is no defensible way to average a Scottish “pass” alongside an English 4, so we never do. Scottish cities are reported separately, on a pass rate, and are absent from the ranked table.

Where a radius picks up a handful of establishments registered under the other nation’s scheme, those are counted and set aside rather than folded into either figure.

Exclusions from the denominator

Businesses marked awaiting inspection, awaiting publication or exempt have no rating to average. They are excluded from rates and averages, and reported separately as unrated. A new opening that has not yet been visited is not evidence of anything, good or bad.

What these numbers are not

They are not a UK national average. They describe the 20 cities we cover, which skew urban, and urban hygiene ratings are not representative of the country. They are also a snapshot: ratings change whenever an inspection happens, so a figure quoted here will drift from the FSA’s live data over the following weeks. Where we say something has changed, we mean it changed between two of our snapshots.

A food hygiene rating measures hygiene standards on the day of inspection. It is not a measure of food quality, and the FSA is explicit about that.

Reproducing this

Every figure on this site can be rebuilt from the FSA API using the parameters above: the city coordinates, a 5-mile radius, the business type IDs listed, and the exclusions described. If you find an error, we would rather know. Tell us.