Essential information > Accessing UK Biobank data

Accessing UK Biobank data

UK Biobank data access guide

The following document provides guidance on how to download the various different type of UK Biobank data:

 Data access guide

The Data Access Guide does not cover how to access data via the UKB Research Analysis Platform (RAP); see here for information about using the RAP.

Please see the Understanding UK Biobank page for information about the data available, which also includes further information and reports about linkage data (Cancer, Hospital Inpatient, Death).

Data Dictionaries and Encodings

  Data Dictionary of Showcase fields:

• Download data dictionary - csv format

• Download data dictionary - tsv format

  List of Data-Codings (including those for the Data Portal):

• Download list of Data-Codings - csv format.

• Download list of Data-Codings - tsv format.

The comma-separated values (csv) versions of the above are easier to view in packages such as Excel, however as the field descriptions and coding meanings sometime contain commas some of the fields are enclosed in quotes to indicate such a comma is not a separator. The tab-separated values (tsv) versions are therefore provided as an alternative.

UKB Synthetic Dataset

A synthetic version of the UK Biobank dataset has been created to allow large scale system testing using data which is comparable in size and constitution to the real dataset.

Further details regarding the methods used to create this resource and links to file downloads can be found on that page.