Welcome to the UK Data Service
Trusted access and training to use the UK's largest collection of economic, population and social research data for teaching, learning and public benefit.
Highlights
Every Story Matters — new data from the UK Covid-19 Inquiry
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.
Department for Education and UK Data Service collaboration
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.
Explore our April 2026 UK Data Service newsletter
In this issue of the UK Data Service newsletter, we share details on the future events we will be hosting, look back on the success of our Crime Surveys User Conference and discuss our ‘Train to Transform’ project. Plus, we celebrate the upcoming release of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry’s Every Story Matters exercise into our collection.
Upcoming training and events
Our impact
How can national data support safer, stronger local communities?
Our new 'local communities in data' impact theme brings together UK Data Service-enabled research, case studies, blog posts and data resources to explore how national datasets are used to understand and strengthen local communities. The theme focuses on three connected lenses: place, people and safety.
UK data infrastructure: challenges, opportunities — and a cornerstone
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.
Gender Equality Index UK case study
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.
Watch our data skills training webinars
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Watch and learn all the latest data skills from our free webinars, training and video tutorials.
UK Data Service essentials: Introduction, finding and accessing data
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.
Introduction to secondary analysis for qualitative and quantitative data
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.
Ignite discovery: elevate your research with data deposits
Deposit your research data free, in our ESRC funded data catalogue.
Latest news
Championing data: Looking back at IASSIST 2026
The International Association for Social Science Information Services and Technology (IASSIST) conference is always a highlight of our year. This year’s conference, held online on 2–5 June, proved to be no exception, with eleven presentations featuring UK Data Service staff being delivered across the four days. In addition to presenting our work, it was fascinating […]
What we learned at the Health Studies User Conference 2026
On 25 June, we held our latest Health Studies User Conference in collaboration with UCL and the National Centre for Social Research. The conference brought together data producers and data users to share updates on key health-related surveys and showcase research using data from these surveys. Health-related survey updates This year’s conference featured several important data updates. Katie […]
The UK Data Service at CESSDA’s 50th Anniversary Conference
CESSDA (the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives) celebrated its 50th Anniversary this year with a conference in Bergen, Norway, between 15 June – 18 June. The conference marks the organisation’s five decades of collaboration, innovation, and service to the European social science research community. It also brough together its Service Providers and partners, […]
Who makes us special?
Our podcast series, The Experts’ Expert, showcases some of the unique work we do to enable evidence-led research for public benefit.
