How this directory works
The Pub Direct lists every place the Food Standards Agency registers as a pub, bar or nightclub: 50,487 of them on 21 September 2026. Each page shows the place’s official food hygiene rating and the date it was given, taken from the register without editing.
Where the data comes from
The ratings, names and addresses come from the Food Standards Agency’s food hygiene register, through its open data service, and are reused under the Open Government Licence v3. Councils carry out the inspections and the agency publishes the results.
The register gives a map location for most places. For the 5,073 it doesn’t, the location is the centre of the postcode, looked up through postcodes.io, and those pages say so under the map.
How often it is checked
We capture the whole register once a month and rebuild the site from it. We started on 27 July 2026 and have taken 3 captures so far. Every page shows the date of the capture it was built from. The agency’s own website is always the latest word, and every pub page links to its record there.
Because we keep every capture, each pub page also shows how its rating has changed since we started checking. That history is ours: the register itself only shows the current rating.
What the ratings mean
England, Wales and Northern Ireland use a score from 0 to 5:
- 5: very good
- 4: good
- 3: generally satisfactory
- 2: improvement necessary
- 1: major improvement necessary
- 0: urgent improvement necessary
Scotland runs its own scheme, which gives Pass or Improvement Required instead of a number. Scottish pubs show those words, and we never convert them into a score.
Exempt usually means a place serves little or no food, so there is nothing to inspect. Awaiting inspection means a new or newly registered business hasn’t had its first visit yet. Neither is a bad result.
A rating covers how food is handled and stored, the condition of the premises and how the business manages food safety. It is not a judgement on the beer, the food’s taste or the welcome.
Old ratings
Councils schedule inspections by risk, so a well-run pub can go several years between visits. A rating given more than 3 years before our latest capture is marked on the page with its age. It is still the official rating; it records the pub on the day of the inspection.
What counts as a pub
The register files pubs, bars, nightclubs, social clubs, sports clubs, village halls and function venues under one heading. About 23% of the entries are not pubs or bars. We sort them by name: a cricket club or a masonic hall is marked as such, listed separately on town pages and left out of search engines. Sorting by name gets the occasional one wrong, so a pub called The Old Liberal is a pub here even though “Liberal” often means a club.
Towns
Each pub’s town comes from its address. Where the address doesn’t give one, we use the parish or district for its postcode. Places that share a name, such as Newport in Wales and Newport on the Isle of Wight, get separate pages.
What this site does not do
- It does not rank pubs or pick a best one. The order is alphabetical.
- It does not take payment to change a rating, an order or a listing.
- It does not say a pub has closed. A place can leave the register when it changes owner, stops serving food or is registered under another heading, so leaving the register is not proof of closure.
Corrections
A rating can only be changed by the council that gave it. Every pub page names the council and, where the register gives one, links to the council’s website. Once the council updates its record, this site picks the change up at the next monthly capture.
Page last reviewed . Data captured 21 September 2026.