Looking to start your trades career or company? Use our tool to compare the courses, costs, opportunities, and competition for tradesmen across the UK, as well as which city is the best for each career, from plumbers to electricians.
We started by creating a list of the top twenty cities in the UK by population. For each of these, we found local jobs, courses, hardware stores, the start-up survival rate, other companies, and advertising costs.
Local jobs were found through Indeed.co.uk, while courses were found through local colleges for each location as well as HotCourses.com. Jobs were divided by 100,000 population in order to provide a more comparable figure across cities.
Hardware stores were sourced through a centralised online listing site LocalLife, while other companies were drawn from Thomson Local.
Advertising costs were generated from Google AdWords. Any words missing data were assigned a cost of £0.00 as a representation of the low pricing.
Start-up survival rate was created using Office of National Statistics numbers of start-up companies in each city by industry, and how many remained open for more than a year.
Once we had complete data, we assigned each a score between 1 and 10. These scores were then included in a calculation that assigned different values to different metrics, based on how valuable we considered them to our final result, and used this valuation and their score to form an overall score out of ten across all metrics. This was then used to rank the locations.
All information was sourced as at 2nd December 2016.