Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

The UK censuses took place on 27 March 2011. They were run by the Northern Ireland Statistics & Research Agency (NISRA), National Records of Scotland (NRS), and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) for both England and Wales. The UK comprises the countries of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Statistics from the UK censuses help paint a picture of the nation and how we live. They provide a detailed snapshot of the population and its characteristics and underpin funding allocation to provide public services. This is the home for all UK census data.

The 2011 Census Microdata Individual Safeguarded Sample (Regional): England and Wales data collection forms part of the statistical outputs from the 2011 UK Census. A safeguarded microdata sample of individuals has been identified as a key Census user requirement, and was highlighted as part of a report specifying microdata products from the 2011 Census written by an expert user, Dr. Jo Wathan from the University of Manchester.

The purpose of a safeguarded sample of individuals is to be able to disseminate a detailed microdata file without onerous licensing conditions, by reducing the overall amount of detail compared to the secure samples. Whilst supplying sufficient detail on core variables to fulfil the intended aim of the microdata products, the safeguarded sample is a valuable multi-purpose research file that will be used on a wide range of projects. (For Censuses prior to 2011, these data may have been referred to as 'Samples of Anonymised Records', or SARSs.)

In total, five microdata samples are proposed from the 2011 Census:

• one public, a Teaching File of individuals (see SN 7613);
• two safeguarded, one file of individuals at regional level (this study, SN 7605) and one at local authority level (see SN 7682);
• and two secure, one file of households and one of individuals

This safeguarded sample is of 5% of the total population at Region level, and contain a similar level of detail to the equivalent End User Licence Census 2001 Microdata samples. These samples have a low risk of disclosure; but not nil. Registered UK Data Service Census users can download the data to their laptops after agreeing terms and conditions that include constraints on data management under remote storage conditions.

Further information can be found on the Office for National Statistics Census microdata webpage.

Corresponding Regional and Local Authority level data for Northern Ireland are held under SNs 7769 and 7770, and for Scotland under SNs 7834 and 7835.

Latest edition information

For the second edition (April 2025), a new version of the data file was deposited. A formatting issue with the NSSEC variable had been identified which resulted in some codes for that variable being grouped together. This has now been corrected.

Main Topics:


The variables cover: Usual address one year ago; Age of individual; Age of household; reference person; Distance travelled to work; Alternative Household Composition; Provision of unpaid care; Number of cars and vans; Central heating; Establishment caters for specific group (physical disability; learning disability; mental illness; intermediate care; substance misuse; end of life care; respite care; chronic illness care; acute illness care; older people; school children; university and/or college students; armed forces personnel; prisoners/offenders; asylum seekers; paying guests; homeless people; nurses/doctors; staff; seasonal/temporary workers; other); Country of birth; Country of birth of household reference person; Whether concealed family; Country of residence; Education selected characteristics, household indicator; Employment selected characteristics, household indicator; Health and disability selected characteristics, household indicator; Housing selected characteristics, household indicator; Deprivation indicators of a household; Long-term health problems; Family dependent children; Economically active; Employment type; Nature of establishment; Ethnic group of household reference person; Ethnic group; Family status; General health; Household language; Level of highest qualifications; Hours worked per week; Number of people in household who provide care; Other National identity (not UK and Irish); Number of individuals in household with long-standing illness/disability; Industry of business; Intention to stay in the UK; International Standard Classification of Occupations – 2 digit codes; Type of landlord; English proficiency; Living arrangements; Last year worked; Main language; Marital Status; Multiple ethnic identifier; Migration indicator; Wholly moving household indicator; Household multiple religion indicator; Distance moved from address one year ago; Region of Origin; British national...

Dataset population: Daytime population/Workplace population/Hectares

Daytime/workday population

Northern Ireland (Daytime Population)

The daytime population of an area is defined as 'All usual residents who are either in employment or full-time students in the area, or not in employment or full-time students but are usually resident in the area'. People who work or study mainly at or from home, or do not have a fixed place of work or study, are included in the area of their usual residence.

The following population groups are excluded from the daytime population of an area:

• Those living in Northern Ireland but working or studying in England, Wales, Scotland, outside the UK or on offshore installations
• Those with a place of work or study in Northern Ireland but who are not usually resident in Northern Ireland
• Short-term residents

Northern Ireland (Workplace Population)

The workplace population of an area is defined as 'All usual residents aged 16 to 74 who are in employment and whose workplace is in the area'. People who work mainly at or from home or do not have a fixed place of work are included in the area of their usual residence.

The following population groups are excluded from the workplace population of an area:

• Those not working the week before 27 March 2011
• Those living in Northern Ireland but working in England, Wales, Scotland, outside the UK or on offshore installations
• Those with a place of work in Northern Ireland but who are not usually resident in Northern Ireland
• Short-term residents

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

The Census 2011 Microdata Teaching File for Northern Ireland data collection forms part of the statistical outputs from the 2011 UK Census. The Teaching File is an open access dataset constructed from the safeguarded microdata sample of individuals (see SNs 7769 and 7770 for background information). Converted by the UK Data Service Census Support Service, it is an SPSS/Stata version of the spreadsheet Microdata Teaching File for Northern Ireland produced by Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA), drawn from data collected in the 2011 Census. The file was produced by NISRA with a variables list and a user guide – all of which are considered the essential and definitive companions to the data. The original spreadsheet format Microdata Teaching File is an open government file and is available from the NISRA 2011 Census Microdata Teaching File webpage.

More information about the teaching file and Census 2011, including forms and links to other Census data, are available both on the NISRA site or via the UK Data Service Census Support webpages.


Main Topics:

Topics covered include: age, economic activity, ethnicity, health, industry, marital status, occupation, religion, whether UK born.

Census 2011 statistics providing estimates of the number and characteristics of the non-UK born short-term resident population of Northern Ireland.

Source agency: Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency

Designation: National Statistics

Language: English

Alternative title: 2011 Census Northern Ireland

Table shows estimates of resident population by 5 year age band from the 2011 Census of England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

England Wales local authorities, counties and regions, plus districts of Scotland and Northern Ireland and total UK population are included.

1) For the 2011 Census, a usual resident of the UK is anyone who, on census day 2011, was in the UK and had stayed or intended to stay in the UK for a period of 12 months or more, or had a permanent UK address and was outside the UK and intended to be outside the UK for less than 12 months.

2) The age of a person is derived from their date of birth. It is their age in years on their last birthday up to and including census day 2011. Dates of birth that imply an age over 115 are treated as invalid and the person's age is imputed.

3) Council area boundaries as at 1 April 2011.

4) Scotland figures in this table may not add exactly because they have been rounded to the nearest hundred.

5) Scotland has not published data by 5 year bands above 80, so all people aged 80+ are included in the 80-84 age group.

Sources:

Table qs103ew (England and Wales)

Table A1 (Scotland)

Table QS104NI (Northern Ireland)

This layer shows the following:Number of all usual residents in communal establishmentsNumber of communal establishments: Medical and Care Establishments: TotalMedical and Care Establishments:Health and Social Care Trust: TotalGeneral HospitalMental health hospital/unit(including secure units)Other establishmentMedical and Care Establishments: Housing Association:TotalHome or HostelSheltered housing onlyMedical and Care Establishments: Other Management type: TotalCare home with nursingCare home without nursingChildren's home (including secure units)Mental health hospital/unit (including secure units)Other hospitalOther establishmentOther establishments: TotalDefence establishments (including ships)Prison Service establishmentsApproved premises (probation/bail hostel)Detention centres and other detention establishmentsEducation establishmentsHotelGuest houseB&BYouth hostelHostel or temporary shelter for the homelessHoliday accommodation (for example holiday parks)Other travel or temporary accommodationReligious establishmentsStaff/worker accommodation onlyOtherFor more information, reference the NISRA site. The Small Area geography polygons used can be accessed through Ordnance Survey Northern Ireland (OSNI) on OpenDataNI.Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland (OSNI) is the official mapping agency of Northern Ireland and is part of LPS, the Land And Property Services executive agency under the Department of Finance in Northern Ireland.The Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) is an agency of the Department of Finance and the principal source of official statistics and social research on Northern Ireland.What can you do with the layer?Visualisation: This layer can be used for visualisation online in web maps and in ArcGIS Pro.Analysis: This layer can be used in dashboards.Download: The data is downloadable.This layer is part of the Living Atlas of the World that provides access to thousands of beautiful and authoritative layers, web maps, and apps.

The aggregate data produced as outputs from censuses in the United Kingdom provide information on a wide range of demographic and socio-economic characteristics. They are predominantly a collection of aggregated, or summary counts of the numbers of people, families or households resident in specific geographical areas possessing particular characteristics drawn from the themes of population, people and places, families, ethnicity and religion, health, work, and housing.

Aggregate data for Census 2011 cover the full range of geographies employed within the census, from the smallest (output areas with an average of 150 persons in England and Wales) to the nation as a whole.

• Access data through InFuse
• Census aggregate data guide

Citation: Office for National Statistics. (2019). 2011 Census: Aggregate Data. [data collection]. UK Data Service. SN: 7427, http://doi.org/10.5257/census/aggregate-2011-2

The UK censuses took place on 27 March 2011. They were run by the Northern Ireland Statistics & Research Agency (NISRA), National Records of Scotland (NRS), and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) for both England and Wales. The UK comprises the countries of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Statistics from the UK censuses help paint a picture of the nation and how we live. They provide a detailed snapshot of the population and its characteristics, and underpin funding allocation to provide public services. This is the home for all UK census data.

Workplace Zones (WZs) are a new output geography, initially produced using workplace data from the 2011 Census for England and Wales rather than the UK as a whole. They are designed to supplement the Output Area (OA) and Super Output Area (LSOA and MSOA) geographies that were introduced with the 2001 Census, and have been constructed from OAs, or sub-divisions of these called postcode-level building-blocks (PCBBs). While OAs are designed to contain consistent numbers of persons based on where they live, WZs are designed to contain consistent numbers of workers, based on where people work. Following publication of WZs for England and Wales, coverage has subsequently been extended to include Scotland and Northern Ireland using 2011 Census data to create a UK set of WZs produced by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on behalf of National Records of Scotland (NRS) and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA). WZs are designed to be a more suitable output geography for publishing workplace statistics.

This dataset provides Census 2021 estimates that classify usual residents in Northern Ireland by ethnic group.

The census collected information on the usually resident population of Northern Ireland on census day (21 March 2021). Initial contact letters or questionnaire packs were delivered to every household and communal establishment, and residents were asked to complete online or return the questionnaire with information as correct on census day. Special arrangements were made to enumerate special groups such as students, members of the Travellers Community, HM Forces personnel etc. The Census Coverage Survey (an independent doorstep survey) followed between 12 May and 29 June 2021 and was used to adjust the census counts for under-enumeration.

This table reports the categories for which there are 10 or more usual residents. Where there are fewer than 10 usual residents for any category, these have been reported in a residual group which may or may not contain 10 or more usual residents in total.

All ethnic groups are classified within one of the five groups: White, Asian, Black, Mixed, and Other. 'Irish Traveller' is included in 'Other'; this is changed from Census 2011 when 'Irish Traveller' was included in 'White'.

Quality assurance report can be found here

As of the 2011 Census, 3.7 percent of the population of Northern Ireland were able to speak, read, write and understand Irish, compared with less than one percent for Ulster-Scots.

Between 1821 and 1921, the entire island of Ireland was a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, after both islands were united by the Act of Union in 1800. This graph shows only the population of the six counties of Ireland that would go on to become Northern Ireland. The population was just under 1.4 million in 1821 and grew to 1.7 million in the next twenty years.

Between 1845 and 1849 the Great Famine devastated the overall population of Ireland, causing the deaths of approximately one million people, and causing a further million to emigrate. Although the famine affected the population of the west and south of Ireland much more severely than the north, the population of the six counties still fell by over 200,000 people between 1841 and 1851. The population then continued to fall, reaching it's lowest point in the 1890s where it was 1.2 million. The Northern Irish population then grows slowly until the mid to late 1900s, during which time the state of Northern Ireland was founded in 1921. The population the reaches over 1.54 million in the 1960s, before it falls again in the 1970s. This drop in population coincides with the outbreak and the most violent decade of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which was a conflict that dominated Northern Irish daily life for decades. However, from 1981 onwards the population grows by 70,000 to 12,000 every ten years, surpassing it's pre-famine level in the 1990s.

Output Area is the lowest geographical level at which census estimates are provided. Output Areas were introduced in Scotland at the 1981 Census and in all the countries of the UK at the 2001 Census.

The Output Areas and Small Areas list contains 232,296 areas of the following constituent geographies:

• 171,372 Output Areas in England
• 46,351 Output Areas in Scotland
• 4,537 Small Areas in Northern Ireland
• 10,036 Output Areas in Wales

Please visit ONS Beginner's Guide to UK Geography for more info.

The boundaries are available as either extent of the realm (usually this is the Mean Low Water mark but in some cases boundaries extend beyond this to include off shore islands) or

clipped to the coastline (Mean High Water mark).

Super Output Areas are a geographic hierarchy designed to improve the reporting of small-area statistics.

The Lower Super Output Areas and Data Zones list contains 42,619 areas of the following constituent geographies:

• 32,844 Lower Super Output Areas in England
• 890 Super Output Areas in Northern Ireland
• 6,976 Data Zones in Scotland
• 1,909 Lower Super Output Areas in Wales

Please visit ONS Beginner's Guide to UK Geography for more info.

The boundaries are available as either extent of the realm (usually this is the Mean Low Water mark but in some cases boundaries extend beyond this to include off shore islands) or

clipped to the coastline (Mean High Water mark).

Workplace Zone (WZ) centroids are point features that represent the 'master postcodes' for WZs. The centroid, or 'master postcode' was selected using an algorithm which calculates the postcode centroid within a WZ which has grid references closest to the worker-weighted centre of the DZ. These centroids / 'master postcodes' can be used to link WZs to other (higher level) geographies and produce a 'best-fit' match. They have been created by the National Records of Scotland (NRS), based on the WZ boundaries which were produced on behalf of NRS by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). WZs were a new output geography for Census 2011, initially produced using workplace data from the 2011 Census for England and Wales rather than the UK as a whole. They are designed to supplement the Output Area (OA) and Super Output Area (LSOA and MSOA) / Data Zone (DZ) geographies that were introduced with the 2001 Census, and have been constructed from OAs, or sub-divisions of these called postcode-level building-blocks. While OAs are designed to contain consistent numbers of persons based on where they live, WZs are designed to contain consistent numbers of workers, based on where people work. Following publication of WZs for England and Wales, coverage was subsequently extended to include Scotland and Northern Ireland using 2011 Census data to create a UK set of WZs produced by the ONS on behalf of NRS and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA). WZs are designed to be a more suitable output geography for publishing workplace statistics.

This statistic shows the distribution of national identities as reported by residents of Northern Ireland on March 29, 2011, the day of the last National Census. 48.4 percent of the population described themselves as British, whereas just under 30 percent described themselves as Northern Irish.

Background

The main population base for published statistical tables from the 2011 Census in Northern Ireland is the usual resident population base as at Census day, 27 March 2011. By way of background, for 2011 Census purposes a usual resident of the United Kingdom (UK) is anyone who, on Census day, was in the UK and had stayed or intended to stay in the UK for a period of 12 months or more, or had a permanent UK address and was outside the UK and had intended to be outside the UK for less than 12 months.

Against this background, the 2011 Census Microdata Sample of Anonymised Records (SARs) Teaching File comprises a sample of 19,862 records (approximately 1 per cent) relating to people who were usually resident in Northern Ireland at the time of the 2011 Census. For each individual, information is available for seventeen separate characteristics (for example, sex, age, marital status) to varying degrees of detail. Both the size of the sample and the content of the records in the file have been harmonised, wherever possible, with the equivalent SARs teaching file that the Office for National Statistics simultaneously released for England and Wales.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the teaching file, which comprises unit-record level data as opposed to statistical aggregates, is as an educational tool aimed at:

• encouraging wider use of Census data by facilitating another way of examining Census data, for example through the building of statistical models, over and above that already available through the raft of standard tabular output released to date;
• providing a broad insight into the sort of detail that is generally included in a SARs product, along with data formats and any associated metadata. This will enable users (arguably those less experienced at using SARs products) to ‘play’ with the data and increase their knowledge and skills in readiness for accessing the more detailed SARs products that are planned and will be available in, for example, a safe setting; and
• assisting with the teaching of statistics and geography at GCSE and higher levels.

The UK censuses took place on 27 March 2011. They were run by the Northern Ireland Statistics & Research Agency (NISRA), National Records of Scotland (NRS), and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) for both England and Wales. The UK comprises the countries of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Statistics from the UK censuses help paint a picture of the nation and how we live. They provide a detailed snapshot of the population and its characteristics and underpin funding allocation to provide public services. This is the home for all UK census data.

Census flow data involve flows of individuals in the UK between origins and destinations. These flows are either the residential migrations of individuals from one place of usual residence to another, or of commuters making journeys from home to workplace or place of study.

These data are derived from the questions on the census form relating to usual place of residence one year ago, and the place of work for the respondent's main job. Flow data are currently available at a range of different spatial scales ranging from Output Areas to Local Authority Districts.

The data are based on the 2011 Census Microdata Teaching File, with the first 18 variables in the OriginalTeachingFileData worksheet exactly the same as those found in the original file. This can be downloaded from: http://www.nisra.gov.uk/Census/2011_results_specialist_products.html. It is also available on the Northern Ireland Neighbourhood Information Service (NINIS) website.The final 8 variables found in the SYLLS_Synthetic_NILS_Spine worksheet, are synthetic data. Those variables corresponding to a 2001 state are based on the transitional probabilities taken from the NILS, accurate to 10 year age groups.