This data is an indexed time series of aggregated card spending flows at a postal district level broken down by merchant and cardholder locations. This contains the indexed proportion of Visa card face-to-face spending (by value) at merchants in each postal district by cardholders resident in each postal district across the UK.

Detail of release

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) have entered into an agreement with Visa to receive aggregated and anonymised data on UK card payments. This data contains the proportion of Visa card spending (by value) at merchants in each postal district by cardholders resident in each postal district across the UK.

The total value for each quarter at a cardholder or merchant location is indexed to 2019 Q1=100. This data is provided as part of the ONS release Consumer card spending, flow of spend across the UK: 2019 to 2023. Please see this release definitions, data sources and quality.

For more details on the strengths and limitations of the data see Regional consumer card spending trends Quality and Methodology Information (QMI) report.

Description of the data

The data set is supplied in CSV format. The dataset includes all postal districts in the UK where Visa card payment data is available to the ONS. Card payment data is aggregated and anonymised by Visa before being provided to ONS. Statistical disclosure controls are applied by Visa before providing the data to ONS. Spending data will be unavailable for a postal district where this would allow the identification of a person, business, or organization. Spending data for a postal district will also be unavailable where there is no data for 2019 as the data cannot be appropriately indexed, or where issues in the geographical information have been identified.

UK postal districts quarterly indexed map data (type: zip, size: 123.3MB)

The following variables are included in the dataset:

time_period_value		Which time period the data relates to. Format: YYYYQQ
Cardholder_location		A cardholder home postal district
Merchant_location		The postal district where merchants are located and spend took place.
Cardholder_index_spend		Proportion of total spend at merchants in the merchant location for cardholders based in the cardholder location.
Merchant_index_spend		Proportion of total spend by cardholders based in the cardholder location at merchants based in the merchant location.

See the ONS release Consumer card spending, flow of spend across the UK: 2019 to 2023 for definitions of excluded categories, face-to-face spending, cardholder location and merchant location.

More information

For queries on the dataset or article please contact:

Telephone: +44 (0)1633455396
E-mail: card.payments.team@ons.gov.uk