Retail sales, Great Britain: February 2025

Retail sales volumes (quantity bought) are estimated to have risen by 1.0% in February 2025. This follows a rise of 1.4% in January 2025 (revised down from a rise of 1.7% in our last bulletin).

Non-food store sales volumes grew strongly in February 2025, with rises across all four sub-sectors (department, other non-food, clothing, and household goods stores), while supermarket sales volumes fell back following a strong rise in January 2025.

More broadly, sales volumes rose by 0.3% in the three months to February 2025, compared with the three months to November 2024, and by 2.0% when compared with the three months to February 2024.

The chart shows the quantity bought in retail sales over time, for both the rolling three-month-on-three-month and the month-on-month movements.

Sales volumes rose by 1.0% during February 2025, following a 1.4% rise in January. Monthly sales volumes in February 2025 were at their highest level since July 2022. Sales volumes rose by 2.2% over the year to February 2025.

Volumes were down by 0.4%, compared with their pre-coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic level in February 2020.

More broadly, there was a 0.3% rise across the three months to February 2025, when compared with the three months to November 2024. This was because of strong growth in January and February 2025. There was a 2.0% rise when comparing with the same period last year. These data are available in our Retail Sales Index datasets.

Non-food stores – the total of department, clothing, household and other non-food stores – rose by 3.1% over the month. This put monthly sales volumes at their highest level since March 2022. Household goods stores rose by 6.8%, their largest monthly rise since April 2021, with hardware stores having the largest upward contribution.

Within other non-food stores, watches and jewellery stores grew strongly over the month. Retailers in this industry reported increased demand for gold because of wider economic uncertainty. Clothing stores also rose in February 2025, but did not fully recover from their 2.7% fall in January 2025. Increased discounting and falling clothing prices as reported in our Consumer price inflation, UK: February 2025 bulletin may have contributed to the increase in sales volumes.

These rises were partly offset by food stores sales volumes which fell by 2.0% on the month, following a 4.8% rise in January 2025. Supermarkets had the largest downward contribution, with retailers commenting on economic factors such as increasing prices.

The amount spent online, known as “online spending values”, rose by 3.3% over the month to February 2025. Sales values also rose by 3.9% when comparing February 2025 with February 2024. However, they fell by 3.1% when comparing the three months to February 2025 with the three months to November 2024.

Total spend – the sum of in-store and online sales – rose by 0.7% over the month. As a result, the proportion of sales made online rose from 25.8% in January 2025 to 26.5% in February 2025.

For February 2025, the Retail Sales Index (RSI) response rates were 65.3%, based on returned forms. This accounted for 96.3% of total turnover coverage of the sample population. For historical response information, see our Retail sales quality tables dataset.

Information on how we calculated the data, including strengths and limitations, and a glossary of relevant terms, is available in our RSI Quality and Methodology Information (QMI).

Accredited official statistics

These accredited official statistics were independently reviewed by the Office for Statistics Regulation in March 2015. They comply with the standards of trustworthiness, quality and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics and should be labelled “accredited official statistics”.