The ranking
The index uses the standard official measure of STI burden — new diagnoses per 100,000 residents, excluding chlamydia in under-25s — for every English district containing a university's main campus. The twenty highest-ranked towns are charted here; the full table of 53 is below.
Manchester's 5,449 diagnoses in 2025 place it clear of the field, and it leads on more than the headline measure: its gonorrhoea rate (297.6 per 100,000) is also England's highest outside London. Neighbouring Salford ranks third at 847 — and its rate is still climbing, up 9 per cent in a year.
Between the two Greater Manchester districts sits Brighton, second at 859 per 100,000. Brighton's headline rate is at least falling, down 6.7 per cent — but it records the highest syphilis rate of any university town (41.2 per 100,000, roughly three times the national figure), and the second-highest in England outside London after Blackpool.
Fourth place goes somewhere less expected: Lincoln, at 749 per 100,000, ranks above Oxford, Liverpool and Birmingham. One reason is worth stating plainly — Lincoln also has the highest chlamydia detection rate among young women anywhere in England outside London, at three times the national average. Places that test more thoroughly find more infections, and their totals reflect diligence as much as behaviour.
Is it actually the students?
To test whether this is a university effect rather than a big-city one, we compared each town's STI rate with its student population share — the proportion of adult residents recorded as full-time students in the 2021 Census.
Correlation: r = 0.60 across all 259 non-London English districts; r = 0.41 within the 53 university towns.
The two measures move together. Across every non-London district in England, student share and STI rate correlate at r = 0.60 — a strong relationship by the standards of population data — and within the 53 towns, each additional percentage point of students is associated with roughly 14 more diagnoses per 100,000 on the trend line.
But the exceptions are instructive. Loughborough, where nearly one adult in seven is a student, has the lowest rate of all 53 towns — 199 per 100,000, less than half the national figure. Oxford has the most student-dense population in England (26.5 per cent) yet ranks fifth, not first. Nottingham, fourth most student-dense, cut its rate by 18 per cent in a single year.
Three things muddy the relationship: university cities have larger night-time economies; they are better served by sexual-health clinics; and, as Lincoln shows, testing effort itself moves the numbers. A high rate is partly a measure of how seriously a place takes finding infections.
Beyond the headline measure
The headline index excludes some of the detail. Three further official measures, same year, same geography — noting that on the third, a higher figure reflects wider screening coverage, which public-health guidance treats as a good outcome.
Gonorrhoea
Syphilis
Chlamydia screening
Where rates rose — and fell
England's rate fell 6.8 per cent in 2025. Sixteen of the 53 university towns moved the other way, with Birmingham recording the sharpest rise; at the other end, Middlesbrough's rate fell by nearly a third.
Largest rises, 2024–25
Largest falls, 2024–25
The Oxford–Cambridge gap
England's two oldest university cities have strikingly different sexual-health profiles, and the distance between them is growing: Oxford recorded the third-largest rise of any university town in 2025, while Cambridge recorded one of the largest falls. The gap now stands at 66 per cent.
A wider version of the same pattern: the fifteen towns hosting Russell Group universities average 473 diagnoses per 100,000, against 383 across the other thirty-eight — a difference of 23 per cent.
These are whole-town rates, not student rates. Every figure describes all residents of a local authority, of all ages. Students are one part of the picture, alongside a district's age profile, its night-time economy, and — importantly — how much testing it does. National context matters too: England's overall rate fell 6.8 per cent in 2025 and is down a quarter since 2019.
Most STIs are straightforward to treat, and testing through the NHS is free, confidential, and in most areas available by post. Details: nhs.uk/sexual-health-services.
The full table
All 53 towns. Sort by any column; rates are per 100,000 residents, 2025. Student share is full-time students among residents aged 16+, Census 2021.
| # | Town | Universities | New STIs /100k | vs 2024 | Gonorrhoea | Syphilis | Students % |
|---|
Method & sources
What we measured
The ranking uses the standard official measure of STI burden: new STI diagnoses per 100,000 residents, excluding chlamydia diagnoses in under-25s (OHID Fingertips indicator 91306), for calendar year 2025 — the latest full year published. Supplementary measures are gonorrhoea (90759) and syphilis (90742) diagnostic rates and the chlamydia detection rate among women aged 15–24 (90776). All are published by the Office for Health Improvement & Disparities and the UK Health Security Agency from GUMCAD/CTAD surveillance returns, at lower-tier local-authority level (April 2023 boundaries).
What counts as a university town
Every English lower-tier local authority containing the main campus of at least one substantial campus-based university — 53 in all. Each town's figures are the whole local authority's: they describe everyone who lives there, not students specifically. Student population share is the proportion of residents aged 16 and over recorded as full-time students in Census 2021 (table TS062, category L15).
- London is excluded from the ranking: its roughly forty universities cannot be attributed to individual boroughs, and its rates sit far above the rest of the country (the capital averaged 1,050 per 100,000 in 2025; Lambeth recorded 2,445). Where we compare university towns with "the rest of England", London is excluded from both sides.
- Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland publish sexual-health data separately and on different definitions, so the index covers England only.
- A few universities have no town-sized authority to map to (Falmouth and Cumbria's campuses sit inside very large rural authorities) and are excluded rather than misrepresented.
Caveats we would raise ourselves
- Diagnosis rates partly reflect testing effort and clinic access. A district that screens thoroughly will record more infections than an identical district that does not; Lincoln's figures are the clearest example.
- University cities are also night-time-economy cities, and students are not the only people being diagnosed. The correlation with student share (r = 0.60 across 259 non-London districts; 0.41 within the 53 towns) is an association, not a causal claim.
- Rates are per 100,000 residents of all ages, so districts with young age profiles naturally sit higher.
- The Russell Group comparison is an unweighted mean of the 15 towns hosting a Russell Group main campus against the other 38.
Sources & licence
Sexual-health data: OHID Fingertips, Sexual and Reproductive Health Profiles, accessed 7 August 2026. Student population: ONS Census 2021. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0; census data Crown copyright. Our compiled dataset is free to download below.
Press kit
Findings, tables and charts are free for publication, in print or online, with credit to Erobella and — online — a link to this page. Press and data enquiries are welcome; contact details are in the release.