The register in numbers

Counted from the same GOV.UK list the rest of this site is built from, published 17 October 2025. Nothing here is estimated and nothing is surveyed.

7,163

• 16venues in the typical council area — the median
• 309are register offices, town halls or other civic buildings
• 67%have a website that could be found for them
• 594are in Wales, and 6,540 in England

Where they are

The spread is wide and the middle is small. The typical council area has 16 approved premises; the largest has 205. A rural county and central London sit next to each other at the top for opposite reasons.

The dates, and what they are worth

1,108 entries — 15% — were already past their approval date on the day this edition was published. 11 months later that figure is 2,702, or 38%. The difference between those two numbers is the whole story of this list: it is a snapshot, it is republished at irregular intervals, and the backlog of unrecorded renewals grows every month it is not.

So 2,702 is not the number of venues that cannot hold a wedding. 1,944 of them ran out in the last two years alone, which is what a renewal not yet recorded centrally looks like in bulk, and the list carries some of the best known venues in the country among them.

The tail is the part worth knowing about. The oldest expired approval still carried on the current official list ran out in 2011.

Expired approvals still on the list, by the year they ran out

Year	Relative size	Entries
2011		2
2013		10
2014		9
2015		17
2016		38
2017		30
2018		46
2019		58
2020		61
2021		72
2022		120
2023		97
2024		198
2025		584
2026		1360

Using these figures

They are free to quote with a link to this page. The underlying data is the GOV.UK approved premises list under the Open Government Licence v3.0; the counting, geocoding and grouping are this site's. How the list is put together.