Scotland's Best Places to Live 2025: Where 12 areas in and around Glasgow rank on the best places to live guide

Since 2013, a team of expert judges on The Sunday Times has used local knowledge and critical acclaim to come up with a list of the best places to live in Britain.

Last year’s winner, North Berwick, East Lothian, was praised by their panel for its sparkling seafront and humming high street.

But for 2025, the Times data team decided to try out a different approach - using data to decide the best place to live.

The Times combined nine different data sets covering a range of different categories for every local authority in Britain. We looked at crime rates in each area. We measured education through looking at Ofsted reports and “Progress 8”, a measure of how much children improve during secondary school. We used three NHS measures: satisfaction with GPs, waiting times and treatment targets. We rolled in the number of listed buildings per area, the number of community-listed companies, and how many parks with Green Flags there were.

Each area was ranked equally based on these measures, and the house price of each area calculated too.

The Times argued however that their Scotland table exposed the limitations of the data. Na h-Eileanan Siar, Orkney and Shetland topped their rankings with great public services, strong communities and cheap houses to boot. That being said they’re incredibly remote islands with low populations that many people wouldn’t want to move to.

For the full list, read The Times article here.

Take a look below at all the council areas around Glasgow to see where they rank.