Construction output in Great Britain: July 2024

• Monthly construction output is estimated to have decreased 0.4% in volume terms in July 2024; this follows an increase of 0.5% in June 2024.

• The decrease in monthly output came from falls in both new work (0.2%) and repair and maintenance (0.7%). 

• At the sector level, monthly output fell in five out of the nine sectors in July 2024, with the main contributors to the monthly decrease coming from private commercial new work and private housing repair and maintenance, which fell by 2.4% and 1.7%, respectively.

• Construction output is estimated to have grown by 1.2% in the three months to July 2024; this came from increases in both new work (1.6%), and repair and maintenance (0.8%); the increase in construction output in the three months to July 2024 came from increases in May 2024 (1.7%) and June 2024 (0.5%).

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

This release contains no revisions to previously published data, and is consistent with the National Accounts Revisions Policy.

Our next monthly construction output release will be published on 11 October 2024, and all periods are currently open for revision. These revisions will be consistent with the quarterly national accounts release publishing on 30 September 2024, and will incorporate improved source data, updated seasonal adjustment parameters, and additional updated data. Our construction output release follows this revisions process after each quarterly national accounts release.

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 July 2024 showed improvement compared with levels in recent years since the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The survey turnover response rate for July 2024 was 76.6%. This follows a response rate of 74.4% in June and 77.0% in May. 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 dataset and 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 are available 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.

Bluebook 2024 publication update

The 2024 UK annual national accounts, also known as Blue Book 2024, will incorporate a number of methodological changes focused on data pertaining to recent years, along with the addition of more recent survey and administrative information.

On 7 August we published our Blue Book 2024: advanced aggregate estimates article to give users details of the impact of the 2024 UK national accounts update on current price and chained volumes measure estimates of GDP from 1997 to 2022.

This estimates 2022 for the first time using the supply and use tables (SUTs) framework, as well as improving the estimates of 2021 with more recent data. We have also implemented outstanding classification decisions affecting the public sector, as well as improvements to the UK trade gas exports deflator. Additionally, we have updated the base year to 2022 after holding this fixed since the start of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

The next Quarterly National Accounts release on 30 September 2024 will incorporate these revisions in our official estimates in line with our National Accounts Revision Policy. These will be incorporated into our monthly Construction estimates in our release on 11 October 2024.

Until the Blue Book 2024 data are incorporated into our monthly Construction estimates on 11 October 2024, our monthly GDP estimates will continue to have a reference and base year of 2019.