How many black cabs are licensed in London?

How to get close to this number

Scale from the city. A metropolis of several million needs a taxi fleet in the thousands rather than the hundreds, but black cabs are only one part of the for-hire market alongside minicabs and app-based services. So the answer is tens of thousands at most and more likely the low tens of thousands — bracketing by what share of the market the category holds is the key step.

The trend catches people out. As the explanation says, the fleet has shrunk by more than a third in a decade, driven by app-based competition and by the cost and difficulty of entering the trade. Anyone anchoring on an older impression of London will guess high, and a declining count is always less intuitive than a growing one.

The Knowledge is what makes this figure a story rather than a statistic. Drivers must memorise tens of thousands of streets and the routes between them, without navigation, in an exam that takes years to pass — a barrier to entry that predates satellite navigation by a century and now competes directly with it. The licensing authority publishes these counts, so unlike many figures on this site it is an administrative record rather than an estimate.