Ordnance Survey (OS) has reported record annual revenue of £198.7m, driven by growth in its National Underground Asset Register (NUAR) and OS Maps.
The figure represents 2.1% annual growth on the 2024-25 financial year, when revenue stood at £194.6m, for the 12 months to 31 March 2026.
NUAR, which OS has now operated on the government’s behalf for a full financial year, brings together records of buried pipes and cables previously held separately by hundreds of asset owners.
The register gives contractors a single view of underground assets before ground is broken, replacing a process in which engineers requested records individually and often waited days for a response.
Openreach, the UK’s largest broadband network provider, has joined the platform this year, contributing location data for more than 550,000 kilometres of its network. NUAR now holds data on more than 3.2m kilometres of pipes and cables, covering more than 80% of known underground infrastructure in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
More than 10,000 users are now registered on the platform, with transaction volumes up 115% over the year. More than 70% of local authorities and 90% of highway authorities have signed up to share information on their assets.
OS’s National Geographic Database (NGD), which contains more than 600m location features and is updated 30,000 times a day, has had a further 16 data collections and 70 major enhancements added since its launch four years ago. More than one million data edits were completed in the past year, while use of the database grew by more than 30% over the same period.
The database reaches the public sector through the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement, under which 6,000 organisations across Great Britain draw on OS data for services including emergency response, transport and infrastructure management, and planning.
OS has also expanded its data partnerships, including with the Office for National Statistics and HM Land Registry. Analysis combining Environment Agency flood data with OS mapping found that 12% of England’s roads and 20% of its rail lines could be exposed to climate-related flooding, while separate analysis identified 1.8m homes 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 6.4m households have driveways or off-street parking, to help local authorities target chargepoint locations.
Customer numbers grew across OS’s commercial sectors over the year, with utilities up by approximately 9% and land and property up by 17%. Subscribers to the OS Maps consumer app rose by 6% to 536,000, while OS completed its acquisition of the remaining shareholding in Dennis Maps.
Nick Bolton, OS’s chief executive, said: “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.”
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