How the register is made

Source and licence

Every entry comes from OpenStreetMap. The data is © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0; the terms are at openstreetmap.org/copyright. This register is a database derived from it and is offered under the same licence. Its files are plain JSON: bars/data/index.json lists the countries and their files, 1,200 entries to a file.

The street map in the desk is drawn by MapLibre GL JS from OpenFreeMap tiles (© OpenMapTiles, data © OpenStreetMap contributors). It is the one thing on these pages that comes from another server, and the list works without it.

The harvest

The harvest ran on 28 September 2026 through the public Overpass API: one country at a time, one query at a time, a pause between queries. The countries are OpenStreetMap’s own, the 216 boundary relations that carry admin_level=2 and an ISO 3166-1 code. The order was the harvester’s, not a judgement of the countries: the areas that had not been counted beforehand went first, in the order of their ISO code; the 14 areas counted beforehand came after them; and 22 areas expected to be the heaviest (among them the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Spain and Italy) were left to the end. The harvest stopped after Sweden. Each harvested country’s query counted its objects first, in the same answer; 14 of the absent areas were counted before the harvest. 138 were harvested in full and are in this edition, 134 of them with at least one named entry and 4 complete and empty (Nauru, Pitcairn Islands, Saudi Arabia, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands). 78 were not reached before the harvest stopped and are absent from it: Afghanistan, Albania, Andorra, Angola, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Barbados, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, British Virgin Islands, Canada, Chad, China, Czechia, East Timor, El Salvador, Eswatini, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kosovo, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, San Marino, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Spain, Suriname, Syria, São Tomé and Príncipe, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Tokelau, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Turks and Caicos Islands, Tuvalu, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Vatican City, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe. 14 of those were counted before the harvest, in a query of their own, and hold 15,442 named bars and pubs between them; the other 64 were never counted. This register says nothing about the absent areas, and no figure on this site estimates them. The data in the answers is dated between 2026-09-28 17:07:06 and 2026-09-28 17:59:21 UTC.

nwr["amenity"="bar"](area.a)->.b;
nwr["amenity"="pub"](area.a)->.p;
(nwr.b["name"]; nwr.p["name"];);
out center tags qt;

From objects to venues

OpenStreetMap objects are not venues: a pub is often mapped as a point and again as the outline of its building. The harvest returned 65,220 named objects. Two objects are taken to be one venue when they carry the same name (compared without case, accents or punctuation) and lie within 150 metres of each other, or when the words of one name are all contained in the other’s and they lie within 50 metres. That merged 1,752 objects into others and left 63,468 venues: 42,873 bars and 20,595 pubs. 873 of them stand on more than one object. An entry links to the object with the fullest tags and takes its kind from it.

What an entry holds

The name, the kind, the position (for an outline, its centre), the address tags, the website, the phone number, the opening hours and the wheelchair tag. Of the 63,468 entries, 11,973 carry opening hours, 7,340 a website, 6,534 a phone number, 18,878 a street and 15,143 a place name. Websites are shown only when they are well-formed web addresses. E-mail addresses are not kept.

Towns

A town, here, is the place an entry names in its own address tags; spellings that differ only by case, accents or punctuation are counted together. The desk offers a town once 3 entries name it, and a town has a page of its own once 40 do: 33 towns. A town’s list in the desk is drawn around the middle of the entries that name it, out to the distance that holds nine in ten of them and a little more, so it also finds the venues mapped without an address.

What is left out

Objects without a name: in the 152 areas that were counted, the counts found 95,707 objects with one of the two tags, 80,662 of them named. Other tags that can mean a drinking place, such as amenity=biergarten, amenity=nightclub or a café that serves wine, are different tags and are not harvested. Places that lie inside no country boundary of the kind described above are not reached.

Limits

The register counts what has been mapped, not what exists. Coverage follows the mappers. A venue may have closed, moved or changed its name since it was mapped. Tags are shown as written. Opening hours are the mapper’s record and are not checked. Distances are straight lines. Nothing here is advice about drinking, and nothing is an advertisement.

How to correct an entry

Entries are not edited here. Follow the entry’s OpenStreetMap link, sign in there and correct the object, or add the pub that is missing with amenity=pub and its name. The change is public at once on OpenStreetMap and reaches this register at its next harvest. To ask about the register itself, write to labs@labs.llc.