The Hiker Study
An ongoing study of Britain’s walkers: what hiking really costs us, what keeps people off the hills, and why we go anyway. Anonymous, open, and published on this site as the numbers come in.
Why we are running this study
Most of what gets written about UK hiking is guesswork. Participation claims come from marketing surveys, cost figures come from press releases, and almost nobody publishes their sample sizes. When we went looking for honest, current numbers on what British walkers actually spend and what actually keeps people off the hills, they did not exist. So we started collecting them.
This study is one half of that work. The other half is the UK Hiking Gear Price Index, where we track the live price of a fixed basket of hiking kit month by month, from budget waterproofs to premium down. The index measures what the gear costs. The study measures the people: what they believe kit costs, what they own, how often they walk, and what would stop them. Put the two together and you can answer questions neither can answer alone, starting with whether the price of getting into hiking matches what people think it is.
How the answers get used
Every answer is counted anonymously the moment it is given, whether you answer one question or all ten. Once a question has enough responses for the numbers to stand up, its findings are published here and woven into our research, alongside the index. Nothing is published without the sample size shown, and this is a self-selected poll of our readers, not a representative sample of the UK. We will always describe it exactly that way, and anyone citing the data is asked to do the same.
What we collect
No names, no emails, no accounts. A random token stored on your device stops double votes, and that is all it does.