Every Principal Council in England, With the Register We Built It From
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
In short. England has 335 principal local authorities. This page lists all of them, grouped by what they are, each linked to its own website. It exists because we needed the list ourselves and found that no single published register is both complete and current.
There is no one place that tells you which councils exist in England today. The Office for National Statistics maintains the authoritative registers of names and codes [1], and they are current, but they carry no websites and they describe statistical geographies rather than corporate bodies. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government funds an open organisation dataset that does carry websites [2], but parts of it have not kept pace with reorganisation. Neither is wrong. They are answering different questions.
So we built the list from both, and recorded what we had to change.
How this list was assembled
The roster comes from ONS. The April 2025 register of counties and unitary authorities, the 2025 register of local authority districts, and the 2025 combined authorities lookup between them define which bodies currently exist.
The websites come from the MHCLG organisation dataset, joined to the ONS roster on the standard geography code.
Where the two disagreed, the ONS register won and the divergence was written down. One county council still listed as active in the organisation dataset does not appear in the ONS April 2025 upper-tier register, which instead lists two successor unitary authorities; its old domain now redirects to one of them. Two combined authorities in the dataset have been superseded by a body covering a wider area, and their domains no longer resolve. The dataset carried ten combined authorities; the ONS register carries fifteen.
Every website on this page was opened before publication. Five had moved to a new domain, in each case a shared site run with a neighbouring council, and were replaced with the address that answered. A site that returns a bot-management challenge rather than a page is recorded as reachable, because it is.
The reconciliation is code, not a one-off edit. The tool that builds this list carries every correction as a named entry with the evidence for it, so the list can be rebuilt from source and the corrections can be argued with. If one of them is wrong, that is a correction to this article under the usual policy, and the corrections log will say so.
What the tiers mean
Where you live determines how many of these bodies you have. Most of England is single-tier: one council does everything. Much of the shire area is two-tier, with a county council and a district council splitting the work between them. London and the six former metropolitan counties have their own arrangements. Combined authorities sit above the others, formed by agreement between councils and usually headed by an elected mayor.
This matters when you go looking for a document. A statement of accounts, a register of interests and a set of committee minutes exist for each body separately. If your area is two-tier, the answer to a question about bin collections and the answer to a question about social care are in different buildings.
Each of these bodies publishes a statement of accounts every year, and each is subject to the public inspection right that goes with it. What that right covers, and how to use it, is set out in our guide to inspecting the accounts.
The register
Names link to each authority's own website. The ONS code is the standard geography code, which is the reliable way to join this list to any other public dataset: names change spelling, codes do not.
Unitary authorities (65)
One council for the whole area, responsible for every local service.
London boroughs (32)
The 32 boroughs, working alongside the Greater London Authority.
Metropolitan boroughs (36)
Single-tier councils in the six former metropolitan counties.
County councils (21)
Upper tier of two-tier areas: education, social care, highways, waste disposal.
| Authority | Region | ONS code |
|---|---|---|
| Cambridgeshire County Council | East of England | E10000003 |
| Derbyshire County Council | East Midlands | E10000007 |
| Devon County Council | South West | E10000008 |
| East Sussex County Council | South East | E10000011 |
| Essex County Council | East of England | E10000012 |
| Gloucestershire County Council | South West | E10000013 |
| Hampshire County Council | South East | E10000014 |
| Hertfordshire County Council | East of England | E10000015 |
| Kent County Council | South East | E10000016 |
| Lancashire County Council | North West | E10000017 |
| Leicestershire County Council | East Midlands | E10000018 |
| Lincolnshire County Council | East Midlands | E10000019 |
| Norfolk County Council | East of England | E10000020 |
| Nottinghamshire County Council | East Midlands | E10000024 |
| Oxfordshire County Council | South East | E10000025 |
| Staffordshire County Council | West Midlands | E10000028 |
| Suffolk County Council | East of England | E10000029 |
| Surrey County Council | South East | E10000030 |
| Warwickshire County Council | West Midlands | E10000031 |
| West Sussex County Council | South East | E10000032 |
| Worcestershire County Council | West Midlands | E10000034 |
District, borough and city councils (164)
Lower tier of two-tier areas: housing, planning, waste collection, council tax billing.
Combined and combined county authorities (15)
Devolved bodies formed by groups of councils, most with an elected mayor.
Other principal authorities (2)
Bodies that sit outside the standard tiers.
| Authority | Region | ONS code |
|---|---|---|
| City of London Corporation | London | E09000001 |
| Greater London Authority | - | E12000007 |
Total: 335 authorities.
What is not here
Town and parish councils are not principal authorities and are not listed. There are thousands of them, they have no single register, and their publication duties are much lighter. Police and crime commissioners, fire and rescue authorities, national park authorities and passenger transport bodies are all separately accountable and are also outside this list.
Sources
- Office for National Statistics, Open Geography Portal: the registers of local authority districts, counties and unitary authorities, and combined authorities used as the roster for this list. https://geoportal.statistics.gov.uk/
- Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, planning data platform: the open organisation dataset used for authority websites. https://www.planning.data.gov.uk/