The relationships between mortality, limiting long-term illness and indicators of social deprivation were investigated using regression analysis on data for rural wards, metropolitan wards and the remaining wards in England and Wales. Regional differences were controlled. In rural wards, people had better health than average and slightly better health than would be expected from their deprivation scores. Average levels of health in rural areas were only weakly related to deprivation, which was partly but not fully due to the restricted range of average deprivation values in rural wards. In metropolitan areas, relatively poor levels of health were largely explained by social deprivation, but people in Inner London were healthier than might be expected from measures of deprivation. The relationship between health and social deprivation is therefore not uniform over England and Wales, but varies between geographical types of area. One consequence is that resource allocation on the basis of social deprivation would put the populations of rural areas and Inner London at an advantage.