Birmingham’s food hygiene scorecard, 2026
How current are Birmingham's food hygiene ratings? Three quarters of the city's 3,357 rated venues were inspected within the past two years. Here is what the dates show.
Birmingham has 3,357 venues carrying an official food hygiene rating, and the data behind them is more current than most. Three quarters were last inspected within the past two years, and more than four in ten within the past twelve months. So when a Birmingham rating tells you a place is clean, how recently was that actually checked?
How current are the ratings?
The median inspection date across the city falls on 16 June 2025. Half of Birmingham’s rated venues were last visited before that date, half after it, which puts the midpoint firmly inside the last fourteen months. The finer split backs that up: 41.2 per cent were inspected in the twelve months to our latest snapshot, and 75.1 per cent within twenty-four months. Fewer than a quarter were last seen more than two years ago.
Those are strong numbers for a city of Birmingham’s size. A rate of better than four in ten venues checked inside a single year points to a local authority working through its list at a healthy pace. The quarter with older dates is worth understanding rather than worrying about, and the next section explains why.
The oldest dates on record
Some ratings go back a fair way, and that is expected. The earliest inspection still standing behind a live Birmingham rating dates to 10 September 2020, close to six years before this snapshot. An old date reads as a warning sign to some people, but it rarely is one. Councils inspect on risk, so a low-risk premises with a clean history can go longer between visits than a high-volume kitchen. Until an inspector returns, the existing rating holds, which is how a five-year-old date and a top score can honestly sit side by side.
Reading a Birmingham rating properly
Every score on this site runs on the Food Standards Agency’s 0 to 5 scale, where 5 means hygiene standards were very good at the time of the visit and 0 means urgent improvement was needed. Treat the number as a snapshot rather than a running commentary. Read it together with the inspection date and the meaning sharpens, because a 5 from three months ago and a 5 from three years ago share a number without sharing quite the same weight. Birmingham’s most recent inspection landed on 3 August 2026, a few weeks before our snapshot, so the record is still turning over.
Where these figures come from
Everything here comes from the Food Standards Agency’s Food Hygiene Rating Scheme, released as open data under the Open Government Licence. We took our snapshot on 26 August 2026, and every count and date above is computed directly from that release, not estimated or rounded for effect. We publish the official inspection result and leave it at that. Verified, not reviewed.
FAQ
How often are Birmingham food businesses inspected?
There is no set interval. The council decides how often to visit based on risk, so busier and higher-risk premises are inspected more frequently than quiet, low-risk ones.
What does the inspection date actually tell me?
It is the date of the last inspection that produced the current rating. That rating stays in place until an inspector visits again.
Should I avoid a venue with an older inspection date?
Not on the date by itself. An older date usually just reflects a lower risk category, so weigh it together with the rating rather than on its own.
Where can I check the original rating?
Each venue page here links straight back to the Food Standards Agency’s own record, so you can confirm the score and the date at source.
Hero image: Jonny Gios via Unsplash.
Corrections and clarifications
No corrections have been issued for this article. If you believe a statistic or claim is inaccurate, please contact the editorial team. We investigate every query and publish a timestamped correction if one is warranted.