xS = expected saunas. Enter a UK postcode or place name to see how many public saunas you should expect in your area.
Local authority
About Sauna xS lookup
xS – “expected saunas” – borrows an idea from football analytics (expected goals, xG) and applies it to sauna geography. It looks at what makes an area suited to public saunas – how rural or urban it is, how close it sits to swimmable water, how touristy and active the community is, and how many of its residents have a degree – and works out how many saunas a place like that should have.
Compare that to what’s actually there, and you get a league table of the UK’s sauna deserts and sauna hotspots.
The model was updated in July 2026. Until now xS read the demand side of an area mostly through money – income and house prices. Testing a richer set of drivers showed that was a stand-in for something else: education. The share of adults with a degree is associated with public saunas nearly twice as strongly as income was, and once it is in, income adds nothing at all. Both money terms have left the model.
What has not changed: the update never adds or removes a sauna, so every nation’s total is identical, and five in six local authorities keep the same reading as before. What has: Brighton and Hove is no longer rated over-served – a city this educated can sustain a big sauna scene, and the old model under-credited that. Cardiff becomes Wales’s clearest gap. In Scotland the education measure does not apply at all (it covers England and Wales only), so Scottish changes come from retiring the money terms.
One check we ran on ourselves: the listings we count saunas from skew towards graduate areas too. Corrected for that, education stays the strongest demand signal we have tested – but its exact size is less certain than its direction. And this describes where the movement has spread so far, not who saunas are for: the wave has not yet reached far beyond Britain’s graduate belt, and we read that as the opportunity, not the destination.
You can search any UK postcode – or a place name in Great Britain – but xS currently covers England, Wales and Scotland. Each nation has its own league table – the model expects different baselines in different nations, so ranks are only ever within a nation. It’s a snapshot of the scene as it stands, not a forecast of where the next sauna will open.
Sauna locations from saunamap.uk, run by the British Sauna Society – public saunas only, the xS measures access, not every sauna in existence. Postcodes and place names via postcodes.io (places from OS Open Names).
Sauna xS lookup, the xS league table, and the xS metric are the work of Mika Meskanen (@saunneur), built with Claude Code.