About & Contact
About
The 2022 Scottish Census reveals that more Scots live in towns with a population between 1,000 and 50,000 people than in any other settlement category, including cities. This underlines the need to understand the changing dynamic of Scottish towns.
Understanding Scottish Places provides a mechanism to do this. It supports practitioners to understand how places across Scotland are similar, emphasising shared characteristics and opportunities to build knowledge on their local context. Often highlighting unseen or unrecognised challenges and opportunities and informing planning, management and policy decisions.
USP organises carefully evaluated, consistent and complete data sets to provide comparable data across all towns and is formed by three parts. Firstly, it identifies a typology for each town and secondly, creates an assessment of towns’ inter-relationships. Read about our Methodology. The USP Your Town Audit forms the third part, a tool designed to help users gather local information which complements the national data available through USP. Find out how you can build on your place profile.
Explore and compare place profiles for 509 towns in Scotland.
Getting started with USP
Search
Use the Search function to find your town or Browse A-Z or Browse by area.
Explore
Open your town profile and explore your town’s typology, its inter-relationships, its placement against key indicators and comparable towns.
Use the i buttons for quick explanations on key indicators and find detailed information on the Methodology page.
Use the ‘View Map’ button to access an interactive map offering significant insights into layout, new development, open space and land use. Maps open in a new tab to allow you to view alongside your place profile.
Compare
Use the ‘Compare towns’ button and add from the list or enter towns you would like a comparison for. USP will generate comparisons on each indicator against other comparable or local towns.
Download
Download your place profile using the ‘Download PDF’ button at the foot of the page.
Audit
Undertake a USP Your Town Audit for your place and build on your place profile. Developed to complement the national data already available about your, it offers analysis of more than 50 measures across 7 KPI themes.
Share
Share findings with your colleagues and wider networks, spark new conversations and let us know how you are using USP.
The Journey to USP 2025
Understanding Scottish Places was commissioned by the Scottish Government to the USP Consortium for development, and launched in April 2015. The platform remains the property of the Scottish Government and is provided as one of the resources available through Scotland’s Towns Partnership with support from the University of Stirling.
Since 2015, USP has undergone four major updates, most recently in November 2025. The data now reflects the 2022 census data and Scotland’s 509 towns. Features include new green agenda variables, house price data and increased map functionality for easy comparison. You can find out more about the indicators on the Methodology page.
The Scottish Government, Scotland’s Towns Partnership and the University of Stirling would like to acknowledge and thank the USP 2015 Consortium which was led by Carnegie UK Trust and included the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES), alongside all institutions, organisations and individuals who have provided data to the USP project. Such support has enabled the continuous development of the tool and its uses.
USP & ScotPHO Wellbeing Dashboard
You may also be interested to explore The Scottish Public Health Observatory (ScotPHO) Wellbeing Dashboard which can provide complimentary data to that provided through USP. It aims to provide a clear picture of the health of the Scottish population and the factors that affect it. Use this alongside your USP place profile.
Contact
All enquiries can be emailed to Scotland’s Towns Partnership, info@scotlandstowns.org