Construction output in Great Britain: February 2024

• Monthly construction output is estimated to have decreased 1.9% in volume terms in February 2024; this follows a 1.1% increase in January 2024, with the monthly value in level terms at £15,229 million in February 2024.

• The decrease in monthly output came from decreases in both new work (2.3% fall), and repair and maintenance (1.4% fall); anecdotal evidence from survey returns suggested effects of heavy rainfall led to delays in planned work and decreasing output in February 2024.

• At the sector level, eight out of the nine sectors saw a fall in February 2024, with the main contributors to the monthly decrease seen in non-housing repair and maintenance, and private commercial new work, which decreased 2.5% and 4.0%, respectively; the only increase was private housing repair and maintenance, which grew 0.2%.

• Construction output is estimated to have decreased 1.0% in the three months to February 2024; this came solely from a decrease in new work (3.0% fall), as repair and maintenance increased by 1.6%.

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 2024) 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

This release contains revisions from January 2023 onwards. The revisions up to December 2023 are consistent with those published in our Gross domestic product (GDP) quarterly national accounts, UK: October to December 2023 bulletin, published on 28 March 2024. This is consistent with the National Accounts Revisions Policy. Revisions in this release are a result of:

• revisions in the nominal data; this includes 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 Construction Output Price Indices (OPIs)

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

Sub-national and sub-sector 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: sub-national and sub-sector 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 February 2024 showed improvement compared with levels seen in recent years since the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The survey turnover response rate for February 2024 was 76.2%. We have continued not to apply a bias adjustment since May 2020, while we review this approach going forward. 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 dataset and our 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.

Publishing content review

This release is a headline-only bulletin. We are currently reviewing the content we publish and are trialling a system of a full bulletin release on quarter months, with headline-only releases on the other two months of each quarter. There will be no change to the accompanying data and we will continue to publish all our usual datasets every month. We will announce a decision in a future release and we welcome any feedback at construction.statistics@ons.gov.uk.