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Table of Contents
UK Licence Statistics
In June 2023 there were a total of 101,172 valid UK amateur radio licences held by an estimated 83,000 individual amateurs (individual amateurs figure derived from 2018 data and subsequent new Foundation exam passes). The licences were made up of:
- 32,127 Foundation
- 13,109 Intermediate
- 54,186 Full
- 1,750 Club
On 1 August 2018 Ofcom stated in response to a Freedom of Information request that “the total number of individuals holding one or more current UK Amateur Radio Licences is 75,660.”
2006 saw the introduction of the Lifetime licence in the UK, this means the licence total figures from that point are cummulative, a similar situation occurs in other countries such as Canada, Sweden, Norway, France etc. In the UK those who have long since given up the hobby and even those who've been dead since 2006 are still listed as holding valid amateur radio licences.
AH0A complied this table of UK licence totals from 1993-2016
The January 1938 RSGB T&R Bulletin published these licence figures for 1933-1937
1992-93 was a turning point for UK amateur radio - the first time in 20 years that licence numbers had declined, falling by 2,200. Licence totals for the year ending March 31, 1993 were reported by the RSGB's on page 7 of the October 1993 Radcom:
- 32,410 Full Class A
- 25,791 Full Class B
- 106 Novice Class A
- 935 Novice Class B
- 59,242 Total
The Foundation licence was introduced on 1 January 2002 and previous Novice licences were converted to Intermediate. In the last few days before Christmas 2002 the 6,000th Foundation licence was issued. Of these 3,100 were newcomers to amateur radio the other 2,900 were to existing holders of the Class B licence.
In recent years the number of valid amateur licences can be derived from the Callsign Spreadsheet released by Ofcom in response to an FoI sent every few months. Valid licences are those callsign spreadsheet rows that have a Status field of “Allocated”. These spreadsheets are available at UK Callsign History and Ofcom Licence Callsign Database Spreadsheets
