Welcome to the UK Data Service

We are delighted to announce that the entire archive of experiences shared with Every Story Matters is to be made available to access through the UK Data Service. This exercise, which was the largest public engagement initiative ever held by a UK public inquiry, has created an invaluable record of how Covid-19 affected people’s lives across the UK.

The Department for Education (DfE) and the UK Data Archive have strengthened their long-standing collaboration through a new framework agreement. Building on a history of successfully curating and providing access to DfE and DfE-linked data, this agreement streamlines the process for depositing and sharing new datasets via the UK Data Service.

Our Dissertation Award 2026 is open for entries and we are delighted to announce the judges. Each year, our judging panel includes experts from the UK Data Service and senior academic staff. This year Dr. Alex Bryson and Dr Roxanne Connelly will be joining Dr Jen Buckley on the panel.

This new Impact Case Study looks at the Gender Equality Index UK: the first index to systematically measure and analyse the socioeconomic outcomes of women and men across all 372 local authorities in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Professor Alison Park, from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), discusses the importance of UK social science data infrastructures and outlines some of the opportunities and challenges they face.

This year, the UK Data Service reached an incredible milestone — over 10,000 data collections are now discoverable through our Data Catalogue. But what is the journey to this milestone? What does it matter? And how does it set the stage for the next chapter of data innovation and impact?

Watch and learn all the latest data skills from our free webinars, training and video tutorials.

This interactive session is ideal for anyone interested in social research and keen to explore the wide range of resources offered by the UK Data Service.

Secondary analysis offers a great option for dissertation students who are looking to gain experience working with data but who have limited abilities to go out into the field or would like to study a hard-to-reach population.