Construction output in Great Britain: August 2024

• Monthly construction output is estimated to have increased by 0.4% in volume terms in August 2024; this follows a decrease of 0.4% in July 2024.

• The increase in monthly output came from growth in new work (1.6%) as repair and maintenance fell by 1.0%.

• At the sector level, five out of the nine sectors grew in August 2024; the main contributors to the monthly increase were private housing new work and private commercial new work, which grew by 3.4% and 2.2%, respectively.

• Construction output is estimated to have grown by 1.0% in the three months to August 2024; this came from an increase in new work (1.7%), while repair and maintenance showed no growth.

Construction output estimates

Construction output estimates are monthly estimates of the amount of output chargeable to customers for building and civil engineering work done in the relevant period, excluding Value Added Tax (VAT) and payments to subcontractors.

Seasonally adjusted estimates

Seasonally adjusted estimates are derived by estimating and removing calendar effects (for example, leap years such as 2020) and seasonal effects (for example, decreased activity at Christmas because of site shutdowns) from the non-seasonally adjusted estimates.

Value estimates

The value estimates reflect the total value of work that businesses have completed over a reference month.

Volume estimates

The volume estimates are calculated by taking the value estimates and adjusting to remove the impact of price changes.

Quality and methodology

More quality and methodology information (QMI) is available in:

• our Construction output QMI

• our Construction output price indices (OPIs) QMI

• our New orders in construction QMI

Reasons for revisions to construction output in this release

As consistent with the National Accounts Revisions Policy, this release contains data for August 2024 for the first time and incorporates revisions for all periods. The revisions up to June 2024 are consistent with those published in our Gross domestic product (GDP) quarterly national accounts, UK: April to June 2024 bulletin, published on 30 September 2024. Additionally, we have updated the base year to 2022 after holding this fixed since the start of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

Revisions in this release are a result of:

• nominal data revisions, including revisions to the survey data

• revisions to seasonal adjustment factors, which are re-estimated every month and reviewed annually

• revisions to the input series for the OPIs

For further information on the revisions profile, see our Output in the construction industry revisions triangle (one-month growth) dataset and ourOutput in the construction industry revisions triangle (three-month growth) dataset.

Subnational and subsector construction output

Data on new orders supplied by Barbour ABI are used to model the breakdown of the overall output figures for Great Britain into the lower level and regional data. This is shown in Tables 1 and 2 of our Output in the construction Industry: subnational and subsector dataset. More detail is available in our Quality assurance of administrative data used in construction statistics methodology.

Bias adjustment

Typically, since the move to monthly gross domestic product (GDP) estimates, an adjustment to address any bias in survey responses for construction output is applied to the early construction output monthly estimates. We show this in our Improvements to construction statistics: Addressing the bias in early estimates of construction output, June 2018 article.

Response rates for August 2024 showed improvement compared with levels in recent years since the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The survey turnover response rate for August 2024 was 81.2%. This follows a response rate of 76.6% in July and 74.4% in June. We have continued not to apply a bias adjustment since May 2020 while we review this approach. More information on our response rates is available in our Output in the construction industry dataset.

Differences with monthly GDP construction estimates

In Blue Book 2021, we introduced a new framework to improve how we produce volume estimates of GDP for balanced years as part of the supply use process. This was explained in our Producing an alternative approach to GDP using experimental double deflation estimates article. This framework included the implementation of double-deflated industry-level gross value added (GVA) for the first time. This improvement was reflected in the GDP quarterly national accounts, UK: April to June 2021 bulletin and datasetand GDP monthly estimate, UK: August 2021 bulletin for the first time.

As a result, volume estimates in the monthly GDP and construction outputs releases will differ for the period 1997 to 2020. This is because the construction publication measures the volume of construction work (output), while the GDP series measures GVA (that is, output minus intermediate consumption). Construction estimates will align, but on a growth basis from January 2021 onwards.

Information and indicative effects of this change to industry-level GVA volume can be found in our Impact of double deflation on industry chain volume measure annual estimates article and our Impact of Blue Book 2021 changes on quarterly volume estimates of gross domestic product by industry article.

Accredited official statistics

These accredited official statistics were independently reviewed by the Office for Statistics Regulation in March 2019. They comply with the standards of trustworthiness, quality and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics and should be labelled "accredited official statistics".