The 2026 seismic hazard maps for the United Kingdom, the Channel Islands, and the offshore Exclusive Economic Zone

he 2026 offshore and onshore seismic hazard maps cover the UK, the Channel Islands, and the UK offshore Exclusive Economic Zone EEZ (UK commercial waters). The data comprises a grid of 4663 points that are spaced 0.125° in latitude and 0.25° in longitude, and is developed for an additional ground motion parameter, spectral acceleration at 0.15 s. Therefore, the 2026 hazard maps are for four ground motion parameters, i.e. peak ground acceleration (PGA), spectral acceleration at 0.15 s (SA0.15 s), 0.2 s (SA0.2 s) and 1.0 s (SA1.0 s), for 5% damping and rock conditions and five return periods, i.e. 95, 475, 1100, 2475, and 5000 years. The report of Mosca (2026) describes these updated maps in detail, whereas the technical report by Mosca et al. (2024) provides a detailed description of the methods (see also http://www.earthquakes.bgs.ac.uk/hazard/UKhazard.html). The input data to compute the maps are in in Mosca et al. (2025; DOI: https://doi.org/10.5285/a6babafa-5c82-4e76-aef5-27441104187f). The map for spectral acceleration at 0.15 s has been used to calibrate the seismic design requirements in the second-generation Eurocode 8 to the hazard levels of the UK and will be cited in the British Standards UK National Annex and PD6698.

Date (Creation): 2026-07-23

Citation identifier: http://data.bgs.ac.uk/id/dataHolding/13608753

Point of contact

Organisation name	Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
British Geological Survey	Enquiries	enquiries@bgs.ac.uk	Distributor
British Geological Survey	Enquiries	enquiries@bgs.ac.uk	Originator
British Geological Survey	Enquiries	not available	Distributor
British Geological Survey	Enquiries	not available	Point of contact

Maintenance and update frequency: notApplicable

GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0

Geology

BGS Thesaurus of Geosciences

Natural hazards
Seismic data

dataCentre

Keywords

NERC_DDC

Access constraints: Other restrictions

Other constraints: licenceOGL

Other constraints: Available under the Open Government Licence subject to the following acknowledgement accompanying the reproduced NERC materials "Contains NERC materials ©NERC [year]"

Use constraints: Other restrictions

Other constraints: The copyright of materials derived from the British Geological Survey's work is vested in the Natural Environment Research Council [NERC]. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a retrieval system of any nature, without the prior permission of the copyright holder, via the BGS Intellectual Property Rights Manager. Use by customers of information provided by the BGS, is at the customer's own risk. In view of the disparate sources of information at BGS's disposal, including such material donated to BGS, that BGS accepts in good faith as being accurate, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) gives no warranty, expressed or implied, as to the quality or accuracy of the information supplied, or to the information's suitability for any use. NERC/BGS accepts no liability whatever in respect of loss, damage, injury or other occurence however caused.

Other constraints: Available under the Open Government Licence subject to the following acknowledgement accompanying the reproduced NERC materials "Contains NERC materials ©NERC [year]"

Spatial representation type: Vector

Language: English

Topic category

Geoscientific information

Geographic identifier: GB
ISO 3166_1 alpha-3 2009 revision

Geographic identifier: UK CONTINENTAL SHELF [id=121701]
British Geological Survey Gazetteer: Geographical hierarchy from Geosaurus 1979 creation

Geographic identifier: UK [id=139300]
British Geological Survey Gazetteer: Geographical hierarchy from Geosaurus 1979 creation

Geographic identifier: UKM
ISO 3166_2 2009 revision

Begin date: 2026-02-16

End date: 2026-04-11

Unique resource identifier: OSGB 1936 / British National Grid (EPSG::27700)

Distribution format

Name	Version
txt

Distributor contact

Organisation name	Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
British Geological Survey	Enquiries	enquiries@bgs.ac.uk	Distributor

Distributor contact

Organisation name	Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
British Geological Survey	Enquiries	not available	Distributor

OnLine resource

Protocol	Linkage	Name
WWW:DOWNLOAD-1.0-http--download	https://webapps.bgs.ac.uk/services/ngdc/accessions/index.html#item192851	Data

OnLine resource

Protocol	Linkage	Name
WWW:LINK-1.0-http--related	https://doi.org/10.5285/c9013191-cc5f-428a-a3e8-fb4560f2e689	Citation Information - Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

Hierarchy level: Dataset

Other: dataset

Conformance result

Title: INSPIRE Implementing rules laying down technical arrangements for the interoperability and harmonisation of Geology

Date (Publication): 2011

Explanation: See the referenced specification

Pass: No

Conformance result

Title: Commission Regulation (EU) No 1089/2010 of 23 November 2010 implementing Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council as regards interoperability of spatial data sets and services

Date (Publication): 2010-12-08

Explanation: See http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2010:323:0011:0102:EN:PDF

Pass: No

Statement: We use probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA) to produce a probabilistic description of expected ground shaking that may occur at a site. This consists of four steps: 1) Definition of seismic sources based on the tectonics, geology and seismicity in the region, forming a seismic source model. 2) Quantification of the rate of earthquake occurrence for each seismic source using the Gutenberg-Richter law. 3) Characterisation of the earthquake effects. 4) Estimation of the hazard at the site(s) by integrating over the seismic sources for the location and size of future earthquakes with expected ground shaking. We used Monte Carlo-based PSHA to generate artificial catalogues by random sampling of the probability distributions in the seismic source model and computing the predicted ground motion for the synthetic events.