The Live Roads API

Getting started

Create a trial key with the form below and add it to the request. Open this in a browser, with your key at the end, and you have data:

https://liveroads.co.uk/api/v1/incidents?road=M25&key=lr_…

It returns JSON. For GeoJSON, ready to drop on a map, add &format=geojson. From code, send the key in the X-API-Key header (or Authorization: Bearer lr_…) rather than in the URL:

curl -H "X-API-Key: lr_…" "https://liveroads.co.uk/api/v1/incidents?nation=wales&type=roadworks&status=active"

Your key

From 14 October 2026 every request needs a key. The key you create here is a trial key: it works for 5 days from its first request, with 120 requests an hour, so you can find out whether the API does what you are building. To carry on after that, choose a paid plan.

We ask for a name, an email and what it is for, for three plain reasons: to tell you when an official source goes quiet or changes; to learn what the API is missing for the people who use it in earnest; and because a key that can be revoked protects everyone from a runaway loop.

GET /api/v1/incidents

Everything the site shows on its map and road pages, from the same live snapshot, refreshed every minute. Every parameter is optional and they combine; lists are comma-separated.

Example

A real request and its answer, one record (with limit=1), fetched from the live API on 8 October 2026 at 22:42 UK time:

https://liveroads.co.uk/api/v1/incidents?road=M25&status=active&limit=1&key=lr_…

{
  "attribution": {
    "text": "Data: Live Roads",
    "url": "https://liveroads.co.uk"
  },
  "meta": {
    "count": 1,
    "total": 12,
    "limit": 1,
    "generatedAt": "2026-10-08T21:42:32.577Z",
    "coverage": "Motorways and trunk roads in England and Wales. Local roads and Scotland are not covered.",
    "licence": "Data: Live Roads (liveroads.co.uk). England: contains National Highways information, Powered by National Highways' Transport Data Feeds (licence based on the Open Government Licence). Wales: Traffic Wales. Weather warnings: Met Office via MeteoAlarm (CC BY 4.0). Keep the source credit of each record.",
    "sources": [
      {
        "name": "traffic-wales",
        "label": "Traffic Wales",
        "ok": true,
        "count": 20,
        "newestAt": "2026-10-08T20:43:00.000Z",
        "stale": false
      },
      {
        "name": "meteoalarm",
        "label": "Met Office via MeteoAlarm",
        "ok": true,
        "count": 0,
        "newestAt": null,
        "stale": false
      },
      {
        "name": "national-highways",
        "label": "National Highways: road and lane closures",
        "ok": true,
        "count": 366,
        "newestAt": "2026-10-08T21:18:39.390Z",
        "stale": false
      },
      {
        "name": "nh-signs",
        "label": "National Highways: motorway signs",
        "ok": true,
        "count": 53,
        "newestAt": "2026-10-08T21:37:24.240Z",
        "stale": false
      }
    ]
  },
  "incidents": [
    {
      "id": "nhs-ad7bbe8185b42c8f9de1",
      "type": "accident",
      "severity": "high",
      "status": "active",
      "lat": 51.711088,
      "lon": -0.291336,
      "title": "M25 near J22 to J21A, anticlockwise: Collision slow down",
      "description": "Shown on National Highways signs (M25 anti-clockwise between J22 and J21A): \"COLLISION SLOW DOWN\".",
      "source": "national-highways",
      "sourceUrl": "https://nationalhighways.co.uk/travel-updates/",
      "road": "M25",
      "direction": "anticlockwise",
      "location": "M25 anti-clockwise between J22 and J21A",
      "nation": "england",
      "startedAt": "2026-10-08T21:22:10.100Z",
      "updatedAt": "2026-10-08T21:26:49.490Z",
      "sourceName": "National Highways"
    }
  ]
}

Response fields

Errors

Trial keys get X-API-Trial-Ends with the end of the trial. Every answer carries X-RateLimit-Limit, X-RateLimit-Remaining and X-RateLimit-Reset.

Limits

Counted per key, not per IP address, so an app with many users is not held back by one of them: 120 an hour on the trial, and a daily allowance on the paid plans (below). Until 14 October, requests without a key are held to 20 an hour per address.

The data changes about once a minute, so asking more often than that brings nothing new. CORS is open: you can call the API straight from a browser.

Plans

The plans pay for access to the service: the API itself, its limits and support. They do not sell or license the underlying data, which belongs to the authorities that publish it and keeps their credits.

To move to a paid plan, write to [email protected] with your project's name, your key and what you use the data for. We reply with the plan and an invoice; your key keeps working, without the trial's end date. Enterprise, for fleets, insurers, media or several countries, goes through Roadscore, the same team's data platform.

Terms and attribution

Using the API means agreeing to show where the data comes from. Building a product on it without a key, or without attribution, is not an authorised use.

Data: <a href="https://liveroads.co.uk">Live Roads</a>

This is not a formality. The data comes from National Highways, Traffic Wales and the Met Office (through MeteoAlarm), and a reader has a right to know that a closure was published by a highways authority, not guessed by an algorithm. The credit lines they ask for are in meta.licence.

Honest about coverage

This API returns what the official sources published, not what is happening on every road. A road with nothing in the response is not a clear road: it is a road nobody has published anything about. Local roads are not covered, nor is Scotland yet, and England's accidents and queues come from what the motorway signs say.

If you build alerts on this, tell the people who receive them. Do not use it for emergency decisions: in an emergency, call 999. Whether each source is answering right now is in meta.sources.

Publishing data, rather than reading it

This page is for reading the data. If you are a council, an operator or another authority and want your closures on the map and in this API, with your name as the source, see the partners programme. It is free for public bodies.

Contact

Questions, a lost key, higher limits or a plan: [email protected].