Ordnance Survey Breaks New Ground with Record Revenue as Britain's Buried Networks Come into View

Ordnance Survey Breaks New Ground with Record Revenue as Britain’s Buried Networks Come into View

Ordnance Survey (OS), Great Britain’s National Mapping Service, announces annual results for the financial year ended 31 March 2026 with record revenues of £198.7m, representing 2.1% annual growth (2024-25: £194.6m). This performance has been driven by the expansion of the National Underground Asset Register (NUAR) and continued growth in OS Maps, alongside deepening demand for OS data among its utilities, land and property customers.

In its first full year under OS operation on the Government’s behalf, NUAR has brought together records of buried pipes and cables previously held across hundreds of separate asset owners, improving on a process in which engineers requested them individually, and often had to wait days for a response. Instant access to a single, secure view of the assets beneath a site allows contractors to plan works before ground is broken and reduce accidental strikes that cut off power and water supplies, cause delays and risk to life.

With Openreach, the UK’s largest broadband network provider, joining the platform and contributing location data for over 550,000 kilometres of its network, NUAR now has data on more than 3.2 million kilometres of pipes and cables, covering over 80% of all known underground infrastructure in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Adoption has broadened across the public and private sectors, with more than 10,000 users and transaction volumes up 115% over the course of the year, while more than 70% of local authorities and 90% of highway authorities have signed up to share information on their critical assets.

Across government and commercial markets, OS’s digital map of Britain remains a trusted source of location data and critical backbone of the UK economy. The OS National Geographic Database (NGD) contains over 600 million location features and is updated 30,000 times a day. Four years on from its launch, OS has added a further 16 data collections and delivered 70 major data enhancements into the database, creating the most detailed digital map of Britain to date. More than one million data edits were completed in the past year alone, while use of the database grew by more than 30% over the same period.

This data reaches the public sector through the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement, under which six thousand organisations across Great Britain draw on OS data to provide routine but critical services to the public. Its use cases span emergency services and public safety, investment, transport and infrastructure management, healthcare access and planning, sustainability and environmental initiatives, and climate adaptation and resilience.

OS has also expanded through integration with key external datasets, including partnerships with the Office for National Statistics and HM Land Registry, strengthening the applicability of its data across a wider range of use cases. Increasingly, this data is being applied to questions of climate resilience and the transition to net zero, to enable better decisions and deliver real-world impact. Analysis integrating Environment Agency flood data with OS’s data found that 12% of England’s roads and 20% of its rail lines could be exposed to climate-related flooding events, while separate analysis identified 1.8 million homes as being at heightened wildfire risk on the edges of towns and cities. OS has also built a machine learning model with Transport for the North to identify which of the region’s 6.4 million households have driveways or off-street parking access, to help local authorities target the location of public chargepoints more effectively. For insurers and lenders, this granularity also underpins how property risk is priced and secured, while for utilities and developers it determines where assets can safely be sited and which need protecting as environmental risks accelerate.

Over the past financial year, demand has also deepened across OS’s core commercial sectors, with customer numbers in utilities growing by approximately 9% and land and property by 17%. In the consumer market, the OS Maps app continues to help more people explore and enjoy the great outdoors, increasing subscribers by 6% to 536,000, while OS’s acquisition of the remaining shareholding in Dennis Maps underlines its commitment to maintaining the national series of paper maps.

Nick Bolton, Chief Executive of Ordnance Survey, commented:

“This year marked the 225th anniversary of our first map, and today, OS continues to innovate to meet the evolving needs of the nation. Our role is not just to provide data, but to ensure that it is continuously improving and delivering valuable insights: from mapping the pipes and cables beneath our streets to the flood and wildfire risks facing the communities above them. This work is helping both public and private sectors make better decisions about where to build, what to protect and how to unlock economic growth, as well as social and environmental opportunities.

“This demand for trusted location data has delivered another year of growth, and with a six-year programme to build our data foundation now complete, our focus is now on making data more accessible to more people and organisations. Doing so will deepen our role as a strategic partner to government while creating greater value for customers across the private sector and strengthen our role as Britain’s national mapping service.”