Noise

How noisy is it where you live?

Every five years Defra models the noise from England's roads, railways and airports on a 10 m grid, and the Scottish Government does the same for Scotland's roads, railways and industry. This page reads those maps for one postcode: the level from each source as a day-evening-night average and at night, in decibels and in plain words, set against the World Health Organization's guidelines for when noise starts to harm health.

  • Road noise
  • Rail noise
  • Airport noise
  • Night levels & WHO guidelines

How this works

The Environmental Noise Directive, kept in UK law, has Defra map noise from major roads, railways and airports and inside every built-up area of 100,000 people or more, in rounds. The fourth round is published on the Defra data services platform as rasters of modelled decibel levels; this page reads the cell under the postcode from six of them (road, rail and airport, each as Lden and Lnight) and keeps the answer for a month. A cell with no value is outside the mapped area, which for most of the country means the nearest major road is far enough away for its noise to fall below the mapping threshold. The maps are a model of average conditions, good for comparing streets and for spotting a spot that breaches the guidelines, and no substitute for listening from the garden on a weekday evening. Scotland’s fourth-round maps, made for Scottish Ministers and published on Scotland’s Noise, are read the same way from SEPA’s map services; they cover roads, railways and industry rather than airports.

Sources

  • Defra strategic noise mapping, Round 4 (road, rail and airport noise, all metrics, England). Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
  • Scottish Government strategic noise mapping, Round 4 (road, rail and industry, 2021), served by SEPA. © Scottish Government, contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2024; Open Government Licence v3.0.
  • Guideline levels: World Health Organization, Environmental Noise Guidelines for the European Region (2018).
  • Postcodes: postcodes.io / ONS Postcode Directory (OGL v3).