The United Kingdom Hydrographic Office

Charting the world

Welcome to the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office (UKHO) website.

We provide nautical charts and navigational services of the world’s oceans and ports to support world shipping, including the Royal Navy.

Our Admiralty products and services have been developed over 200 years, and we use the very latest techniques to continue to help protect lives at sea today.

Worldwide responsibilities, local knowledge

Our mission is to meet national, defence and civil requirements for navigational and other hydrographic information in the most efficient manner.

More about our role and purpose

A force for good

We are part of the Ministry of Defence. For over two centuries we’ve worked to improve the effectiveness of the armed forces by providing nautical products and services that enhance navigation and situational awareness.

More about our defence services

Tide of change

In addition to our renowned series of Admiralty paper charts we have responded to the demand for seamless Electronic Navigational Chart (ENC) coverage with our new Admiralty Vector Chart Service (AVCS), which can be updated from anywhere in the world at the touch of a button.

More about AVCS

Worldwide partnership

Ships carry 90% of world trade, over 7 billion tons of cargo a year. Keeping them out of danger demands a global solution. We work with our sister hydrographic offices worldwide to provide mariners with the most up-to-date nautical information available.

We contribute to international forums and support the worldwide hydrographic community. Where we can, we offer help in the form of technical training, expertise sharing and partnership.

More about training

The UKHO on the Internet

The UKHO has several other websites serving a range of functions. These include:

www.admiralty.co.uk

This site is dedicated to Admiralty products and services, contains the latest news and information, and has help on the transition to ECDIS.

www.ukho.gov.uk/copyright

This site allows you to generate free licenses for using our intellectual property in your products and services.

Easytide.UKHO.gov.uk

This site allows users to freely acquire tidal information for over 7000 ports world wide for the current day plus up to 6 days into the future. There is a further service which incurs a small charge allowing the user to gain tidal information from any date between 100AD and up to 50 years in the future and access tide predictions for 7 or 14 days at a time.

www.ukho.gov.uk/nmwebsearch

A searchable online database of Notices to Mariners (NMs) affecting Admiralty Standard Nautical Charts.

Updates.UKHO.gov.uk

This site should be accessed by customers using our digital products, as it gives free online updates to our digital charts and publications.

INSPIRE and MEDIN Bathymetry Data Archive Centre (DAC)

As a Public Authority, the UK Hydrographic Office is making relevant data sets available in compliance with the ‘Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe’ (INSPIRE) initiative.

We have been accredited by the Marine Environmental Data and Information Network (MEDIN) as the national Data Archive Centre for bathymetric surveys. We have therefore included access to relevant bathymetric surveys held in our Data Archive Centre as part of our INSPIRE portal.

A viewer for all the INSPIRE and MEDIN data sets can be accessed from the link below.

INSPIRE Portal