Catalogue › Infrastructure & Networks
OS Terrain 50
Ordnance Survey
- Licence
- Open Government Licence v3.0
- Cost
- Free
- Account needed
- No
- Harvestable
- Automated
What it contains
Open height data: 50m grid DTM plus contours, spot heights, breaklines, coastline, lakes, ridges and formlines. Baseline terrain for drilling access, pipe gradients and ground-level referencing.
When you need it
Useful at these project stages, from the working group's stage matrix:
- Matched on
- Ordnance Survey and topographical surveys; Site photogrammetry
- Assigned by
- Matched to data items the matrix names
Coverage and detail
- Geographic
- Great Britain (England, Scotland, Wales). NOT Northern Ireland - OSNI is a separate agency.
- Nations
- England, Scotland, Wales
- Resolution
- 50 m grid / 10 m contour interval
- Formats
- Varies by product: CSV, GML, GeoPackage, Shapefile, vector tiles, raster (GeoTIFF)
- Update cadence
- OS OpenData refresh roughly quarterly; OS Open UPRN and Open USRN every six weeks
Access and machine route
- Licence as stated
- Open Government Licence v3.0 with the OS OpenData attribution requirement: 'Contains OS data (c) Crown copyright and database right [year]'
- Assertion source
- as published by Ordnance Survey
- Protocol
- OS Downloads API v1 (REST/JSON, lists product versions and direct download URLs); OS Maps API / OS Vector Tile API for tiled access
- Endpoint
- https://api.os.uk/downloads/v1/products
- Harvest note
- yes-automated note recorded in the machine_endpoint field: OS Downloads API open products need no key also
Caveats
GB only - Northern Ireland requires OSNI/LPS products via Spatial NI. OS OpenMap Local buildings carry no height or attribute data. Terrain 50 is too coarse for site-level design (use LIDAR).
Classification
- Category
- Infrastructure & Networks
- Sub-category
- 3.2 Electricity networks & grid capacity
- Assigned by
- Stated by the source
- Depth domain
- Surface
- Data form
- Raster, Tabular, Vector
- Evidence confidence
- Not yet assessed. Only a person can set this.
How current this entry is
- Last updated here
- 2026-09-22
- Last checked against the holder
- 2026-09-07
- Checked by a person
- Not yet. Nobody has read this entry.
- Catalogue id
- os-terrain-50
Open at Ordnance Survey
Openly licensed. No account needed.
Resolved
A server answered on 2026-09-08 and returned the expected page.
Checked by automated request, not in a browser. A site can answer a script and still fail for a reader, so treat this as a weak signal.
Machine endpoint (Varies by product: CSV,…)
Additional link (Varies by product: CSV,…)
More from Ordnance Survey
This record as JSON
Report a problem
Ordnance Survey. OS Terrain 50. Accessed via UK Geothermal Data Catalogue, https://catalogue.geothermaluk.org/id/os-terrain-50/. Record os-terrain-50.