What Sweetstep is

Sweetstep is a free public tool that shows connectivity scores for postcodes in England and Wales. Scores are derived from the Department for Transport's Connectivity Metric 2025 (published — not formally designated as National Statistics), licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

The public lookup tool requires no account.

Data accuracy and limitations

Scores are modelled estimates, not observations of actual travel behaviour. They reflect theoretical accessibility based on road networks and timetables at a point in time. They do not capture real journey times, personal circumstances, or service disruptions.

The source data is published but not formally designated as National Statistics by the Department for Transport. Figures may change before formal designation.

Traffic-light thresholds (red / amber / green) and classification labels (e.g. “Car Dependent”) are working heuristics, not published standards. Definitions are on the Methodology page.

Scores cover England and Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland are not currently covered to the same degree.

No warranty

Sweetstep is provided “as is” without warranty of any kind. We do not guarantee that scores are accurate, complete, or current. We are not liable for decisions made based on this data.

You are responsible for verifying that any use of this data is appropriate for your purpose. For decisions with significant consequences — such as planning applications, healthcare commissioning, or mortgage lending — independent verification is strongly recommended.

Acceptable use

You may use Sweetstep to:

• Look up connectivity scores for any postcode in England and Wales
• Embed or share individual results for personal or informational use
• Access the API for lawful commercial or non-commercial purposes within your rate limit

You may not:

• Attempt to circumvent rate limits or access controls
• Republish data at scale without retaining the methodology limitations, provenance disclosures, and licence notices
• Use data in ways that are incompatible with the Data Use Policy
• Scrape the website in ways that degrade service for other users

We reserve the right to suspend API access for breaches of these terms.

API keys

API keys are issued free of charge for authorised use. You are responsible for keeping your key secure. Do not share keys or commit them to public repositories. If your key is compromised, revoke it immediately from the dashboard and generate a new one.

We log API usage (endpoint, timestamp, latency, status code) for rate limiting and service integrity purposes. We do not log request bodies or response payloads.

Intellectual property

The underlying connectivity data is Crown copyright, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. You are free to use, copy, and distribute it with attribution, subject to the OGL terms.

The Sweetstep platform, scoring presentation, derived indices, search behaviour analytics, and crowd-validated accuracy data are proprietary. You may not reproduce or redistribute these without a commercial licence. See the Data Use Policy for commercial access terms.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales. Any disputes will be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. Continued use of the service after changes are posted constitutes acceptance of the updated terms. Material changes will be noted in the changelog.