Top 25 Towns & Cities for SME Jobs 2023

About the data

To calculate a town or city’s score in the ‘Top 25 Town & Cities for SME Jobs’ index, each local authority for the towns and cities were scored and ranked against five variables; commuting time (minutes), average hourly wage, job density, SME growth from 2017 to 2022 and average house price. The data used for these variables reflects the most recently available data on the ONS - some of which had to be filtered through the ONS platform Nomis. 

Within each variable, towns and cities were ranked, for example, having the quickest commute time would give a town or city the rank of ‘1’ - a low score. Having the longest commute time would give a town or city the lowest rank and therefore highest score (e.g a rank of 150th would be a high score and low rank). This scoring method was then applied across all five variables. The best rankings for a town or city would go to those which have a high hourly wage, high job density (how many jobs there are per capita), high percentage of SME growth from 2017 to 2022 and low average house prices.

To create an overall table, each town or city’s individual variables ranking is used to give it an individual variable score (e.g 1st = 1 or 31st = 31). These are then accumulated across all five variables to give a final score (e.g. 1 + 31 = 32). Towns and cities are then sorted by their total score, the lower the total score the better, and ranked in positions i.e 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc. Those with the same total score are given the same final ranking. 

Any questions about the data, or want to see the full analysis? Please contact press@iwoca.co.uk.‍