Christmas 2026, area by area
We expect 15,700 people in Britain to cheat at a work Christmas party this year. Here is that number split across all 350 council areas.
These are estimates, not counts. Areas differ by how many people work there and how many of them have a partner. How it works.
Tap an area to see its numbers. Pinch or use the buttons to zoom.
What the map shows
Big places have big numbers. Once you allow for size, the differences come down to who lives and works where.
Every area
Counted by where people live. Tap a column to sort, or a row to see the area on the map.
Regions and nations
London has more people kissing a colleague than anywhere else, but fewer of them have a partner at home.
Methodology
Nobody measures office party behaviour council by council. These figures share out our national estimates using official data on who lives and works in each area.
Employee numbers are payrolled employees by council of residence, from HMRC payroll records published by the ONS, averaged over the year to August 2026. Party attendance per employee is assumed to be the same everywhere.
The workplace view uses the number of employee jobs located in each council area, from the ONS Business Register and Employment Survey for 2024. It shows parties thrown by employers in that area, whoever attends. The ONS has flagged quality problems with the 2024 figures for Hillingdon and Hounslow.
The share of workers who live in a couple comes from Census 2021 for England and Wales. It ranges from 45% in Lambeth to 72% in North Kesteven. For Scotland we used the 2011 census, adjusted to match, because the equivalent 2022 table was not available to us by council.
Our national model assumes that single people are much more likely than partnered people to get together with a colleague at a party, but only partnered people can cheat. So areas with more single workers get more kissing and less cheating, and areas with more couples get the reverse. In the workplace view each area uses the couple share of its wider region.
Figures are rounded. The cheating estimate for each area carries the same uncertainty as the national one: the true figure could be a quarter lower or a third higher. Very small areas are shown as "fewer than 10". Rates are per adult aged 18 and over (ONS mid-2025 population estimates), and areas with fewer than 20,000 adults are left out of the rate rankings.
About 13% of the cheating figure is expected on Friday 11 December, the same share everywhere.
Great Britain only: England, Scotland and Wales. Council boundaries are those in use since April 2023. Shetland is drawn in a box on the map to save space.
Boundaries: Office for National Statistics, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2023. Postcode search uses postcodes.io.