RAJAR
RAJAR — Radio Joint Audience Research — is the United Kingdom's official radio audience measurement service. Based in London, it produces the quarterly listening figures by which every BBC and Ofcom-licensed commercial radio station in the country is judged: how many people listen each week, for how long, on which platform, and in which part of the day. Those figures are reported across national and trade media every quarter as “the RAJARs”, they set the terms on which radio advertising is bought and sold, and they have charted, over more than three decades, radio's transition from a medium of AM and FM sets to one dominated by DAB, online listening and smart speakers — without ever abandoning the diary method on which the service was founded in 1992.
A Single Currency for BBC and Commercial Radio
RAJAR was established in 1992 to provide a single measurement system for the UK radio industry. Before it, BBC and commercial radio relied on separate arrangements, with commercial listening measured under the JICRAR system. The new body was set up jointly by the BBC and the Association of Independent Radio Companies, the commercial sector's association, as a limited company jointly owned by the BBC and commercial radio — in modern terms, the BBC and Radiocentre, the commercial industry's trade body — with representation from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising and agency interests in its management. The timing mattered: RAJAR was created ahead of the launch of the first Independent National Radio services, when national commercial stations would compete directly with BBC networks and advertisers would need, for the first time, directly comparable figures for both sides. The first RAJAR survey was conducted in the fourth quarter of 1992, with results published in January 1993.
The Diary Method
RAJAR measures listening with self-completion diaries, a technique inherited from JICRAR and first introduced to commercial radio in the 1970s. A representative sample of adults — respondents are drawn from the population of each station's transmission area and of the nation as a whole — records its listening for one week, in quarter-hour periods, noting the station, the time, the duration, the platform and the location of listening. Diaries were traditionally paper; online completion is now also offered. Across a year, the listening of more than 100,000 adults aged 15 and over is captured over some fifty continuous weeks of fieldwork. RAJAR has argued for the diary's distinctive strength: because it records what a person actively reports hearing, rather than depending on a particular piece of hardware, the method has proved unusually resilient as listening devices have changed — from transistor radios to DAB sets, phones, computers and voice-activated speakers, the diary asks the same question in the same terms.
What the Quarterly Figures Contain
RAJAR publishes its results quarterly, and the release is a fixed point in the British media calendar. For each station and network the headline measures are weekly reach — the number of adults listening for at least five minutes in a week — total listening hours, share of listening within its area, and average hours per listener, broken down by daypart, demographic group and platform. Group owners aggregate their stations into portfolios, which is why quarterly coverage typically leads on the performance of the big commercial groups, Bauer Media Audio and Global, against the BBC. The figures also track the structure of the market itself: in the first quarter of 2026, RAJAR reported a total weekly audience of 50.6 million adults, 87 per cent of the UK population, with commercial radio accounting for 54.3 per cent of listening against the BBC's 43.4 per cent. By the second quarter of 2026 the reported audience reached a record 51.1 million adults a week, with commercial radio passing 40 million weekly listeners for the first time in the current measurement era.
Charting the Digital Transition
Because RAJAR records platform as well as station, its long run of data is the standard account of how British listening has changed. Digital listening — via DAB, digital television, websites and apps and smart speakers — grew from a supplement to analogue to the majority of listening: recent quarters have put digital at around three-quarters of all listening hours. Within that, the balance continues to shift. In early 2026 online listening reached a new high of about 30 per cent of all listening, ahead of AM and FM combined at roughly a quarter, while smart speakers accounted for close to a fifth of total listening and more than a fifth of commercial listening. DAB remains the largest single digital platform. For historians and journalists alike, these RAJAR platform shares — not anecdote — are the evidence base for claims about the decline of analogue radio, the rise of the smart speaker, and the resilience of live radio against on-demand audio.
RAJAR, Podcasts and Listening Beyond Stations
RAJAR's remit is licensed radio, but its research has periodically looked wider. Its online listening studies in the late 2000s tracked the public's adoption of internet radio, listen-again services and podcasting when those behaviours were new: surveys of that period found roughly a third of adults claiming to have listened to radio via the internet, and millions downloading podcasts, with only a minority listening to everything they downloaded — an early, much-quoted measure of the gap between downloading and listening. In recent reporting, podcast listening has appeared alongside the main results as context, with well over a third of UK adults reported as listening to podcasts at least monthly. RAJAR's station survey itself, however, remains deliberately focused on live and licensed radio, which is what its owners fund it to measure and what advertisers trade on.
Methodology Under Pressure
The diary has never lacked critics. A paper record kept by hand can miss short or incidental listening, depends on respondents correctly identifying the station they heard — a real difficulty among similarly branded network stations — and produces small samples for small stations, whose quarterly figures can swing sharply. The 1999 methodology revision, introduced with research contractor Ipsos-RSL after three years of planning and testing, simplified the diary and standardised quarterly reporting for all stations regardless of size, a change the BBC and commercial shareholders jointly funded. Later debates have concerned electronic metering and whether passive measurement should replace or supplement diaries. RAJAR's position has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary: keep a continuous, comparable series — one whose first diary, from 1992, the organisation preserves among its own records — while adapting completion methods and platform definitions as listening changes. Continuity is not nostalgia; a currency that breaks its own series destroys the year-on-year comparisons on which trading and journalism both depend.
Who Runs the Survey
RAJAR itself is a small joint-industry company; the fieldwork is carried out by a research contractor, for many years Ipsos — the Ipsos MORI team long associated with the survey — under RAJAR's specification and governance. Stations subscribe to receive their own and competitors' data in full; the headline national and station figures are published openly each quarter and are freely reported. Governance is shared between the BBC and commercial radio, an arrangement modelled on the other British Joint Industry Currencies such as Barb for television: the measured parties fund and oversee the measurement jointly, with independent research execution, so that neither side can be accused of marking its own homework.
Why RAJAR Release Day Matters
Each quarterly release generates a wave of coverage that illustrates RAJAR's role as a news source. National media report the breakfast-show contests in London and the network standings; trade titles such as Radio Today and The Media Leader publish station-by-station analysis; station groups issue their own releases highlighting records and growth — a new station's first audience, a brand passing a milestone, a presenter overtaking a rival. Underneath the celebration, the same figures feed advertising negotiations for the following quarter. Few British media institutions are so routinely quoted and so little examined: “according to RAJAR” is the standard attribution, and the figures are treated as settled fact by the outlets reporting them, which is precisely what a Joint Industry Currency is for.
Radio's Endurance, Measured
Perhaps RAJAR's most important long-term finding is the simplest one: radio endures. Weekly reach in 1992, when only seven national stations appeared in the survey — BBC Radios 1 to 5, Classic FM and Atlantic 252 — was already around 89 per cent of adults. More than thirty years later, with more than forty national stations and networks, hundreds of local and digital services, and competition from streaming and podcasts, weekly reach remains in the high eighties and total listening exceeds a billion hours a week. RAJAR's diaries documented commercial radio overtaking the BBC in share of listening in the 2020s, and online listening overtaking analogue. For a directory of news and media agencies, RAJAR earns its place as the measurer of record for British radio — the organisation whose quarterly numbers tell the industry, and the public, what the nation's listening actually looks like.
