Peterhead
Town · 19,196 residents
59Good
Good · better than 4 in 10 towns
Check Local Score out of 100 · 60 is typical for the country
Each arc is a topic, coloured by its score
What’s good
- Safety scores 76, well above the typical 60
- 69% of residents live within five minutes of a park
Check before you view
- Radon: part of the area is in an affected zone, and a home test is cheap
- Road noise reaches 51% of the area
- Food & drink scores 29, below the typical 60
The essentials
Everyday life
The area
Map outline: Official settlement boundary (National Records of Scotland)
Is Peterhead a good place to live?
Peterhead scores 59/100 overall, which the scorecard rates as good — 60 is typical for the country.
It stands out for safety (76) and environment (75).
It scores lowest on food & drink (29) and transport (31).
Scores come from official data on safety, schools, transport, prices, health, food & drink and the local environment, for Peterhead in Scotland, each measured against the national average.
Summary of Peterhead
Peterhead is a working harbour town, and it looks like one — granite terraces, a skyline still organised around the fish market and the port rather than a retail centre, and a working-age population going about a rhythm that has more to do with boats and the North Sea than with commuter timetables. It doesn't perform for visitors, and that's part of its character: this is a place built for living and working, not for browsing.
The numbers behind that impression are middling-to-decent rather than glossy, and that's worth sitting with rather than glossing over. Peterhead sits in the middle of Scotland's deprivation rankings — decile 5, with income landing a shade lower at decile 4 — putting it neither among the country's more deprived towns nor its more comfortable ones. House prices tell a similarly grounded story: a median of around £198,000, essentially flat over the past year, in a country where "flat" is itself a kind of stability rather than stagnation. Council tax at Band D level sits almost exactly on the Scottish average, so you're not paying a premium or getting a discount for being here — you're paying the going rate for the country you're in.
What stands out, and what the letter grades quietly insist on even when you look past them, is safety and environment scoring well above the pattern you'd expect from the housing and income figures — both graded strongly, safety flat but firmly so, while nightlife and connectivity trail behind at a more modest level. That's the shape of the place: a town where you feel secure and where the green space (66 sites, close to 80 hectares) gives you somewhere to walk the dog or let the kids out, but where broadband is patchy in places (full fibre reaching under half of homes) and the evening economy is thin. Health provision is graded solidly, in line with a population whose median age, at just over 44, skews a little older than the Scottish average — this is a town of established households more than one of young professionals in flux. With eight schools serving a population of around 17,000, there's a reasonable local spread for families already rooted here, though this is a place you settle into rather than pass through.