Analysis

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What is the Total UK Public Spending?

In the fiscal year ending in 2025, total UK public spending, including central government and local authorities, was £1,244.9 billion. In the fiscal year ending in 2026, total UK public spending is expected to be £1,323.8 billion.

Total Planned* Public Spending

Total

Central

Local

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Spending / Pie Chart

	Function	-yr 2016 +yr
	Total Spending	£785.6 billion
	Pensions	£154.7 billion
	Health Care	£138.5 billion
	Education	£84.9 billion
	Defence	£44.8 billion
	Welfare	£113.6 billion
		source: outturn

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or click: 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018

Central vs. Local / Debt

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GDP / Spending

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Note:
* Central spending after 2020 is planned. Local spending after 2019 is “guesstimated.”

Drill down to tables of functional public spending by year here.

Top Spending Requests:

Find NATIONAL DEBT today and history.

See DEFENCE SPENDING.

Check OVERALL EXPENDITURE.

Check SPENDING breakdown, details and history.

Get WELFARE stats, HEALTH CARE stats, and EDUCATION stats.

DOWNLOAD spending or national debt.

Get BUDGET details and est. vs. actual.

See PIE CHARTS of total spending, central spending.

See CHART GALLERY of spending.

See COUNTRY SPENDING for England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland.

See REGIONAL SPENDING for London etc.

See BAR CHARTS of spending, debt.

See PIE CHARTS here.

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Spending Data Sources

Expenditure data since 1983 comes from HM Treasury’s Public Expenditure Statistical Analysis reports.

Detailed table of spending data sources here.

Gross Domestic Product data comes from measuringworth.com.

Central government spending data begins in 1692.

Local authority spending data begins in 1868.

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Data Sources for 2016:

GDP: OBR EFO supp. economy tables
Revenue: ONS PSF time series dataset
Debt: OBR Public Finances Databank

> revenue data sources for other years

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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.