What you need to know before you register

Academic users can obtain the SARs free of charge for the purposes of research or learning and teaching.

Before obtaining the data you will need to register with Census.ac.uk. This is a quick online procedure which should take no more than a few minutes. During registration you must agree to the End User Licence Agreement

In order to verify your identity you will be asked to log in using your UK HE/FE Institutional username and password.

Registering with the Census.ac.uk will permit you to use a range of Census products beyond the SARs. You will not need to register for the Census products separately.

We are very happy for students to use the data, both for solo project work and in classes. Teachers are encouraged to use the data in class exercises, however, any students using data in class must be individually registered.

If you have any queries about the process you can contact us.

Ready to register?

Simply go to Census.ac.uk and follow the instructions.

To obtain the data once registered

You have a variety of online options (as outlined on our access methods page):

Direct download	You can download whole SAR files in SPSS portable format or tab-delimited files to read into a package of your choice.
Nesstar	Nesstar is a data exploration tool which allows you to explore the data online before downloading a subset of your specification in a wide range of formats. Our Nesstar User Guide is available in PDF and Word format.
NSDstat	Users who do not have analysis software but who wish to work with the data offline can obtain the NSDstat analysis package here.
Contact us	If you are unable to use these methods, you can request a CD-ROM containing SARs files from CCSR via our contact form. Obtaining the data in this medium will cost £30.
Custom subset	Download a customised subset of the larger SARs. Select the dataset you want, the format you want, and then pick exactly the variables you want - all right in your browser.