Everybody quotes a number for the commonest pub name and nobody says where it came from. Published figures for the commonest pub name disagree with each other, and none of the ones we found says what it counted or could be run again.
So we counted, from OpenStreetMap, and wrote the query down beside the answer. Ours is not a better number than theirs. It is a number you can check. Why there are so many Red Lions explains where the name came from; this page is only the arithmetic.
The count
20 names, 3,902 pubs, in the United Kingdom and Ireland, on 10 September 2026.
| Name | United Kingdom | Ireland | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Red Lion | 473 | 1 | 474 |
| Royal Oak | 389 | 2 | 391 |
| Swan | 304 | 5 | 309 |
| Railway | 262 | 4 | 266 |
| White Hart | 247 | 0 | 247 |
| Crown | 246 | 0 | 246 |
| White Horse | 220 | 1 | 221 |
| Rose and Crown | 211 | 0 | 211 |
| New Inn | 207 | 1 | 208 |
| Plough | 185 | 0 | 185 |
| Wheatsheaf | 160 | 0 | 160 |
| King's Arms | 142 | 0 | 142 |
| Bell | 128 | 2 | 130 |
| Coach and Horses | 121 | 0 | 121 |
| Queen's Head | 115 | 0 | 115 |
| King's Head | 114 | 0 | 114 |
| Fox and Hounds | 110 | 1 | 111 |
| George | 103 | 1 | 104 |
| Ship | 80 | 1 | 81 |
| Star | 65 | 1 | 66 |
How we counted
Overpass API, objects tagged amenity=pub or amenity=bar whose name matches the regular expression, case-insensitively, inside the country boundary. Nodes, ways and relations are all counted, so a pub mapped only as a building is included as well as one mapped as a point. Where a pub is mapped both ways OpenStreetMap holds two objects, and this count includes both.
The name has to match exactly, give or take a leading "The". A pub called the Red Lion Hotel is not counted as a Red Lion here, and neither is the Old Red Lion. That is a choice, and it is the likeliest reason our Red Lion figure is lower than the published ones. How much a looser match would change the figure, we have not measured.
Here is the query behind the first row, exactly as it was sent. Paste it into overpass-turbo.eu and you will get today's answer, which may not be ours.
[out:json][timeout:90];area["ISO3166-1"="GB"][admin_level=2]->.a;nwr["amenity"~"^(pub|bar)$"]["name"~"^(the )?red lion$",i](area.a);out count;What it does not tell you
A count of names is not a count of pubs, and this one has three particular limits worth saying out loud.
- It counts what is mapped, not what exists. OpenStreetMap's coverage of British pubs is unusually good, but a pub nobody has added is a pub we have not counted, and a pub that closed last year often keeps its tag for a while yet.
- It counts the sign, not the age. Nothing here says how old any of them are. A common name is not evidence of an old pub — a great many Red Lions are Victorian, and several are 1990s. That is what the rest of this site is for.
- It counts bars too. The query takes anything OpenStreetMap tags as a pub or a bar, because the line between the two is drawn differently from town to town.
- It counts one spelling. Kings Head, King's Head and Kings' Head are all folded together; the Red Lion Hotel is not. Every counting rule draws that line somewhere, and where it is drawn changes the answer more than anything else does.
The figures are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0, with the underlying data Counted from OpenStreetMap data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL (https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright).
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