Economy · Overview

The UK Economy

Eight numbers that shape your cost of living, your job, and what the government can afford to spend. Updated as official data is released.

The Economy · Inflation

Data as of · interpretation reviewed June 2026

Is the cost of living still going up?

Yes — at about , still above the Bank of England's 2% target. Here is what the number measures, and why the path down has been bumpier than it looks.

This is CPIHCPIH — the ONS's headline inflation measure. It tracks the cost of a fixed basket of what households buy, including owner-occupier housing costs. the headline measure of how fast prices rise. When it falls, prices are not dropping — they are simply rising more slowly than before.→ How the Bank of England responds to this

Inflation peaked near 9.6% in late 2022, driven mainly by energy prices after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It fell sharply through 2023–24 — but the descent stalled, climbing back above 4% during 2025 before easing again.→ What this did to your pay packet The clean "inflation is fixed" story is wrong; it has sat above target for years, and that stickiness is what keeps interest rates higher.

The Economy · Interest Rates

Data as of · interpretation reviewed June 2026

Why are interest rates where they are?

The Bank Rate is currently . It is the single most important price in the economy — and it moves chiefly in response to the inflation number.

The Bank RateBank Rate is set eight times a year by the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee. Raising it cools spending and borrowing; cutting it encourages them. is the Bank's main tool for hitting its 2% inflation target. The logic is direct: when inflation runs hot, the Bank raises the rate to cool borrowing and spending; as inflation eases, it can cut.← The inflation it is chasing

You can see the relationship in the chart: rates were held near zero while inflation was low, then climbed steeply as inflation surged in 2022, and have edged down only as inflation has come off its peak. The gap and the lag matter — the rate is set for where inflation is heading, not just where it is.→ Why this lands on your rent or mortgage

The Economy · Wages

Data as of · interpretation reviewed June 2026

Are you actually better off?

Pay is rising about a year — but what decides whether you can buy more is pay after inflation. That figure is : above zero, but only just.

The line below is the clearest answer to "am I better off?" When it sits above zero, the average worker's pay is outrunning prices. When it drops below, it isn't — and you can see it plunge through 2022–23, the worst pay squeeze in a generation.← The inflation that drove pay below zero

Two caveats. This deflates pay by CPIH — using CPI instead gives a slightly higher figure. And "average" pay hides enormous variation: public vs private sector, region and industry all diverge sharply.

The Economy · Housing Costs

Rents as of · house prices as of · interpretation reviewed June 2026

What is happening to rents and house prices?

Rents are up about over the year. House prices are up about — a figure that looks alarming and is mostly an illusion.

That near-zero house-price figure is a base effectBase effect — when an annual % change is distorted by something unusual in the year-ago month, not by anything happening now., not a frozen market. Prices surged a year earlier as buyers rushed to beat the April 2025 stamp-duty change.

Rents tell a cleaner story: they climbed steeply through 2023–24 as higher mortgage costs and tight supply fed through to tenants, and have only recently begun to ease.← Why higher rates weigh on prices

The Economy · Jobs

Data as of · interpretation reviewed June 2026

Is it getting harder to find work?

The unemployment rate is about — up from the lows of a few years ago. The jobs market has been loosening, not tightening.

Unemployment fell to around 3.8% before the pandemic, spiked briefly in 2020, dropped back, and has since drifted up to roughly .← How a cooling jobs market feeds rate decisions

One important caveat: this comes from the Labour Force Survey, which the ONS still classes as "in development." Response rates fell sharply in 2023; they have since recovered, but the ONS advises focusing on long-term movements rather than month-to-month wobbles.

The Economy · Living Standards

Data as of (annual) · interpretation reviewed June 2026

Is the country actually getting richer?

Output per person grew last year. Step back, and the longer picture is the one that matters — and it is close to stagnation.

Before 2008, output per person grew at roughly 2% a year. The chart below — indexed so 2007 equals 100 — shows what happened next: a crash, a slow crawl back to 2007 levels, the pandemic plunge, and a recovery to barely above where it started.← Why this shows up in flat real pay

The trap this page is built to avoid: headline GDP has grown substantially since 2007 — "the economy is bigger" is true but misleading. The population grew alongside it, so the slice per person barely moved.

The Economy · Public Finances

Debt as of · interpretation reviewed June 2026

Can the government afford any of this?

The national debt stands at of GDP. The government is still borrowing £bn a year — and paying £bn in interest before a single service is funded.

Comparing debt to GDP is the only honest frame. The figure here is excluding public sector banks — the measure used by OBR and Treasury. The "including" figure is substantially larger and appears in scare headlines; it is not the working number.← Why rates affect the cost of new borrowing

In 2020 the government paid £42bn in interest. By 2022 that jumped to £108bn — because around a quarter of UK borrowing is in index-linked giltsIndex-linked gilts are bonds whose payments rise with inflation (RPI). When inflation hit 9.6%, the interest bill exploded., so the inflation surge directly inflated the debt-servicing bill.

The OBR's own forecast has debt rising for three more years — peaking near 96.5% in 2028-29 — before a modest decline. NIESR puts the peak closer to 99%. Both agree: debt will not fall meaningfully within any normal political horizon. The fiscal rulesFiscal rules are self-imposed government targets for borrowing and debt. Not legally binding; changed several times. require debt to be falling by 2029-30; on the OBR forecast it is, but only just.

Credit ratings

Credit rating agencies give countries a grade for how likely they are to repay their debts. A higher rating means investors trust the country to pay them back — which keeps borrowing costs lower. There are three main agencies:

All three agencies have the UK one notch below the top rating. The UK lost its top AAA rating from S&P and Fitch in 2013, after the financial crisis left public debt much higher than before. Moody's followed in 2013 too. A further downgrade — say, to A — would signal to global investors that the UK is a meaningfully higher-risk borrower, likely pushing up the interest rate the government pays on new debt. Since the UK currently borrows around £130bn a year, even a small rise in rates has a large effect on the interest bill.

Parliament

Parliament

Who holds the seats, who leads the government and opposition, and how to contact the person who represents you.

Find your MP

Commons composition

Based on the 2024 General Election. By-elections and party changes may not be fully reflected.

Lords figures are approximate. The Lords is unelected; members are life peers, hereditary peers (now limited), and Lords Spiritual (Church of England bishops).

Seat distribution — current Commons

2024 general election · 650 seats · majority at 326

Bills currently in Parliament

Active legislation in the current session, most recently updated.

See all bills on Parliament.uk →

Crime

Data: year ending December 2025 · interpretation reviewed June 2026

Is crime going up or down?

The Crime Survey says there were about 4.4 million incidents in the past year — down from a peak of nearly 20 million in 1995. But police-recorded figures tell a different story, and the difference matters.

International Rankings

How does the UK stand in the world?

Nine independent international measures of where the UK sits globally — across democracy, rights, safety, innovation, and development. Several show a consistent downward trend.

Democracy & Rights

Press Freedom

Innovation & Equality

Defence & Development

The Freedom House score fell from 97 to 92 between 2013 and 2025 — a consistent decline across multiple governments. It measures political rights and civil liberties on a 0–100 scale where 100 is fully free. The UK remains rated "Free" but the direction matters.

The corruption perceptions score fell 11 points between 2017 and 2024. The Rule of Law index (WJP) has been broadly stable at around 0.78–0.81 since 2012. Both are perception-based measures surveying business people and legal experts.

Press freedom improved significantly — the UK moved from rank 40 (2017) to rank 18 (2026). RSF changed its methodology in 2022 which affects score comparisons but not the rank direction. On innovation, the UK has ranked in the top 5 globally since 2013. The gender gap jump from 14th to 4th in 2025 was driven by Labour's gender-equal cabinet.

Military spending dropped from 2.63% of GDP (2009) to 1.93% (2018) then rose to 2.44% (2024) as NATO spending targets became politically salient. The government has committed to reaching 2.5% of GDP.

Economy · Investment

World Bank data to 2024 · ONS public investment to 2025 · reviewed June 2026

Why does Britain keep underinvesting?

The UK invests about 18.7% of GDP — well below the OECD average of 22.3% and the world average of 25.6%. This gap has been structural for decades, and it sits beneath almost every other number on this site.

Low investment is not a recent problem. The UK has spent most of the post-war period near the bottom of the advanced-economy league table for investment. The political consequences compound over time: low investment → low productivity growth → stagnant real wages → flat GDP per head. The flat lines on the Wages and Living Standards pages are, in significant part, the downstream effect of decades of underinvestment.

The UK was broadly in line with comparable economies through much of the 1970s, at around 20–23% of GDP. The fall came in two waves: first through the 1980s and 1990s as North Sea oil revenues reduced the perceived urgency of productive investment and financial liberalisation redirected capital into asset markets; then again after 2008, when the financial crisis triggered a sharp contraction in private sector investment that has never fully recovered.

How the UK compares internationally

The gap between the UK and its peers is not marginal. South Korea and Japan, which industrialised later and invested heavily in infrastructure and manufacturing, invest nearly twice the share of GDP that the UK does. Even the United States and Germany — both high-wage, high-productivity economies — invest significantly more. The OECD average (22.3%) is roughly 4 percentage points above the UK. At current GDP levels, closing that gap entirely would require around £115bn of additional annual investment.

Public vs private investment

An important nuance: public investment has actually increased as a share of GDP over this period — from around 1.7% in 2000 to 3.3% in 2025. The underinvestment problem is therefore primarily one of private sector investment: business investment in machinery, R&D and productive capacity. British companies, under pressure to return cash to shareholders and deterred by short planning horizons, have consistently invested less than their international competitors. The financial sector's dominance of the UK economy has reinforced this: capital flows to where returns are quickest, which tends to be financial assets rather than long-dated productive investment.

Economy · Inequality

ASHE 2025 provisional · ONS Wealth & Assets Survey 2020–22 · reviewed June 2026

Inequality — who gets what, and who owns what

The overall pot has grown. But who it grows for matters. Mean weekly earnings (£757.50) now exceed median earnings (£642.50) by 18% — and wealth is far more concentrated than income.

The mean/median gap

The mean is the sum divided by the number of people. The median is what the person in the exact middle earns. When these two numbers diverge, it tells you the distribution is skewed — a concentration of high earners pulling the average above where most people sit. In the UK, more than half of all employees earn below the average wage. That is not a paradox. It is a measurement fact with significant political consequences for any policy that aims to share growth broadly.

The chart above shows the full distribution of weekly earnings — not just the two headline numbers. The P10 figure (£227.40) is the threshold below which the lowest-paid 10% of workers fall. The P90 figure (£1,335.90) is the threshold above which the highest-paid 10% sit. The top 10% earn nearly six times the bottom 10%. The mean (£757.50, shown as a dashed line) sits above the median precisely because the right tail of the distribution — the high earners — pulls it upward.

Wealth is more unequal than income

Earnings inequality tells you who gets what from the current economy. Wealth inequality tells you who owns the accumulated stock of past production — property, financial assets, pensions, savings. The two are linked: those who earn more can save more and accumulate wealth; that wealth then generates returns that compound over time. The result is a wealth distribution far more skewed than the earnings distribution.

The bottom 50% of households hold just 9.8% of total wealth. The top 10% hold 40.7%. This is the pattern Piketty identified as the structural consequence of capital returns (r) persistently exceeding economic growth (g): the stock of wealth grows faster than incomes, compounding inequality across generations. The past, in his phrase, devours the future.

One important caveat: the ONS Wealth and Assets Survey, as a household survey, is known to underestimate the very top of the wealth distribution. The wealthiest households are under-represented in survey samples. The World Inequality Database, which uses a different methodology that imputes top wealth from national accounts and tax data, puts the top 10% share closer to 45%. The structural story is the same under either estimate.

The wealth Gini has remained broadly stable at around 0.61–0.63 since 2006, with a small recent decline. Stability at this level is not reassuring — it means inequality is persistent, not improving. The slight decline in the most recent period (2020–22) likely reflects COVID-era factors: government transfers boosting lower-decile savings, and property price movements affecting the relative position of property-heavy lower deciles. Whether this represents a structural shift is too early to judge from one survey wave.

PocketGov

The state of the nation

Real-time government data translated into plain language — how Britain is performing right now.

National vital signs

My area

2029 General Election

The next election

How the current government is performing against its own milestones — and where the polls stand heading into 2029.

Latest polls

YouGov / PollCheck 7-poll average · June 2026

Voting intention: "If a general election were held tomorrow, how would you vote?" Figures are an average of the 7 most recent polls, weighted by sample size.

Plan for Change — pledge tracker

Six milestones Keir Starmer said voters should judge him on by 2029.

Health

Health

NHS waiting times, health outcomes, A&E performance and public health data.

Education

Education

School standards, attainment, PISA rankings and education funding.

Welfare

Welfare

Universal Credit, poverty measures, child poverty and benefits spending.

Pensions

Pensions

State pension, triple lock, auto-enrolment and the generational divide.

Housing & Planning

Housing & Planning

Housebuilding targets, completions, homelessness and planning.

Transport

Transport

Rail performance, road investment, fares and public transport.

Environment

Environment

Air quality, water quality, biodiversity and environmental targets.

Energy

Energy

Energy prices, bills, emissions, renewables and net zero progress.

Justice

Justice

Court backlogs, prison population, legal aid and reoffending.

Immigration

Immigration

Net migration, visa grants, asylum claims and small boat crossings.

Defence

Defence

Defence spending, personnel, equipment and NATO commitments.

Business

Business

Business creation, insolvencies, trade, exports and productivity.

Culture

Culture

Arts participation, creative industries, sport and media consumption.

Site Maintenance

Engine Room

Every data series on the site, its source, how often it is released, and whether the figures shown are current.

Traffic lights are computed from the time since the last data update against the expected release cadence. Green = within normal range. Amber = approaching next expected release. Red = overdue.

Series	Source	Frequency	Last updated
Inflation (CPIH)	ONS	Monthly	—
Bank Rate	BoE	Monthly	—
Real pay growth	ONS	Monthly	—
Unemployment	ONS	Monthly	—
House prices	ONS/LR	Monthly	—
Rents	ONS	Monthly	—
GDP per head	ONS	Annual	—
Public debt	ONS	Monthly	—
Debt interest	ONS	Annual	—
Wages (nominal)	ONS	Monthly	—
CSEW Crime	ONS	Annual	—
Happiness rank	WHR	Annual	—
Human Dev. Index	UNDP	Annual	—
Corruption score	TI/OWID	Annual	—

All data updated manually. This site does not auto-refresh. Next scheduled data releases: ONS CPIH 17 June 2026 · ONS PSF 19 June 2026 · ONS AWE ~July 2026.