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Government Spending Chart Wizard

Follow the simple steps below to make your own chart of public spending. You can select up to five spending functions to compare on a single chart.

Step One: Select the UK or the region and the years you want to chart.

UK or individual country or region:

UK or Country: By default, the chart shows overall United Kingdom government spending. But you can select spending for individual countries by selecting the country dropdown control in the table heading.

Data units:

Spending Units: By default, public spending is displayed in billions of pounds. By using a dropdown control in the table heading you can select £ bln (2019), and percent of GDP.

Start Year: End Year:

Note: First year of available data for individual regions is 1992.

If you want to chart data for a single year, go to the Numbers page.
If you want a pie chart, go to the Pie Chart page.

Step Two: Select the data you want to chart.

(Up to five allowed)

(Click on dropdown to select the spending function you want)

Step Three: Select the chart characteristics.

Bar chart or line chart:

Line/Bar: By default, the data series are displayed as line charts. But you can also select a bar chart.

Stacked chart (or not):

Data Stack: By default, the data series are “stacked” when displayed on the chart. But you can change the setting to “un stack” the data series.

Chart size:

Chart Size: By default, the chart is displayed at medium size. But you can use the dropdown control to change the size.

small = 300x200, thin = 350x230, medium = 390x250, large = 550x300

Color or black-and-white:

Color: By default charts are displayed with color data lines and fill. You can change this to grayscale if you want.

Step Four: Display your chart.

Click button:

Don’t worry. You can add functions or change things later.

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Data Sources for 2006_2026:

Sources for 2006:

GDP: Measuring Worth - UK GDP
Spending: Archived HM Treasury PESA
Debt: OBR Public Finances Databank

Sources for 2026:

GDP: OBR EFO supp. economy tables
Spending: HM Treasury PESA
Debt: OBR Public Finances Databank

> spending data sources for other years

PESA 2025 Update

On July 23, 2025, HM Treasury published its Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses (PESA) for 2025. ukpublicspending.co.uk uses the PESA tables of public spending at the "sub-function" level as its major data source for UK public spending.

ukpublicspending.co.uk has now updated its spending tables using data from PESA 2025. The update includes outturn spending data for 2023-24, and plans data for 2024-25. ukpublicspending.co.uk uses PESA's Table 6.4 for Central Government expenditure, Table 7.4 for Local Authority expenditure, and Table 8.3 for Public Corporation capital expenditure.

Since HM Treasury does not provide plans estimates for future Local Authority spending, ukpublicspending.co.uk provides "guesstimates" instead. This is done by extending the percentage increase in spending between 2023-24 and 2024-25 for each sub-function for the plans year. It is assumed that local authority spending reductions will not carry through to plans years.

Country and Region spending has been updated up to 2023-24. These are obtained from Chapters 9 and 10 in the PESA document.