UK Air Quality: DEFRA AURN Live and Hourly Readings

Get official UK air pollution readings from DEFRA's UK-AIR network (the Automatic Urban and Rural Network and affiliated sites) as a clean table. One row per station, pollutant and hour, with coordinates, units and, for NO2, the Daily Air Quality Index (DAQI) band.

Who it's for

• Property, proptech and relocation sites showing "air quality near this address".
• Health, fitness and running apps that want a live pollution signal for a route or city.
• ESG, insurance and research teams pulling hourly history for reports and models.
• Dashboards and alerts: schedule it hourly and trigger on NO2 or PM2.5 spikes near a site.

What you get

• PM2.5, PM10, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, nitric oxide and carbon monoxide (or everything the network publishes, including VOCs).
• About 150 monitoring stations across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
• Latest valid reading per station (default) or up to 7 days of hourly history.
• Near-me search: give a latitude and longitude plus a radius and get the nearest stations first, with the distance in km.
• NO2 rows carry the DAQI index (1 to 10) and band (Low, Moderate, High, Very High), which DEFRA defines on the hourly mean.

Example output

{"stationName":"London Marylebone Road","pollutant":"Nitrogen dioxide (NO2)","pollutantKey":"NO2","value":27.731,"unit":"ug.m-3","timestampUtc":"2026-10-15T05:00:00.000Z","daqiIndex":1,"daqiBand":"Low","latitude":51.52253,"longitude":-0.154611,"distanceKm":null}

Inputs

Pollutants, station name contains, near latitude and longitude with a radius, hours of history (0 for latest only), include missing readings, and max results.

Pricing

$1 per 1,000 readings plus a $0.005 start fee. A live snapshot of PM2.5, PM10, NO2 and ozone for every station is roughly 500 readings, about $0.50. A 24-hour history for the 10 stations nearest a point is a few cents.

Notes

• Source: DEFRA UK-AIR SOS API. © Crown copyright Defra via uk-air.defra.gov.uk, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
• Recent hours are provisional and can be revised or ratified later by DEFRA. Hours the network has not published yet are skipped unless Include missing readings is on.
• Timestamps are UTC as published by the UK-AIR API.
• Only environmental measurements are collected. No personal data.