Retail sales, Great Britain: July 2025

The quantity of goods bought (volume) in retail sales is estimated to have fallen by 0.6% in the three months to July 2025 when compared with the three months to April 2025. This decline follows four months of consecutive three-month on three-month growth.

Retail sales volumes are estimated to have risen by 0.6% in July 2025, following an increase of 0.3% in June 2025.

Non-store retailers and clothing stores sales volumes grew strongly in July 2025, which retailers attributed to new products, good weather, and an increase resulting from the UEFA Women’s EURO 2025 tournament.

During our scheduled annual review of Retail sales seasonal adjustment, as part of our quality assurance, we identified a problem with a file used to adjust for our survey reference periods not aligning precisely with calendar months. Our Retail sales data are different, as we use default data collection periods on a four-week, four-week, five-week cycle, which then need to be aligned to calendar months. These are called “phase shift effects”. For recent time periods, some parameters were not correct, affecting seasonally adjusted data within our retail sales release.

Retail sales non-seasonally adjusted data are unaffected by this, as they refer to raw data where the effects of regular or seasonal patterns have not been removed. Calendar effects, such as Easter moving between March and April or the movement of the data collection periods, are not adjusted for in the non-seasonally adjusted data. This is why seasonal adjustment is important.

At the headline level, the effect on the monthly, seasonally adjusted series was from January 2025 until May 2025, when some holiday effects and “phase shift” effects were not properly accounted for.

Alongside correcting this error, we have conducted a detailed annual review of our seasonal adjustment parameters and settings. Using the latest data, all seasonal adjustment factors have been fully reviewed and re-estimated.

Figure 1 presents the combined effect of this correction alongside:

• revisions because of broader improvements to our seasonally adjusted approach
• new data because of late responses to survey returns

The main effect on the index levels is between January 2025 and May 2025.

The average month-on-month percentage change figure revision at the headline level between February 1988 to July 2024 was 0.0 percentage points. The absolute average revision over the same period was 0.3 percentage points. These are considered to be within usual revisions following a seasonal adjustment review. Revisions over the last 12 months are larger from January 2025 to May 2025.

Supermarkets had the largest contribution to headline correction and revision over the last 12 months, followed by mail-order retailers. Non-food stores sales volumes (a category comprising department, clothing, household, and other non-food stores) were little changed. The correction and revision to supermarkets can be seen in Figure 3.

Revisions to the monthly and three-monthly growth rates of the headline series are also covered in more detail in our Retail sales revisions triangles, one-month growth dataset and our three-month growth dataset.

Retail sales and gross domestic product (GDP)

Retail sales data are used to estimate growth of the retail trade (excluding motor vehicles and motorcycles) industry in the output measure of gross domestic product (GDP). The retail trade industry has a GDP industry weight of 4.8%.

In our GDP first quarterly estimate, UK: April to June 2025 bulletin, retail trade (excluding motor vehicles and motorcycles) contributed 0.02 percentage points to GDP growth in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025 and 0.06 percentage points in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025. Following these updates, this estimate remains unchanged to two decimal places in Quarter 2 2025 and the contribution to GDP in Quarter 1 2025 has been revised down to 0.03 percentage points. Despite the change in contribution, and all else being equal, GDP in Quarter 1 2025 would have been unchanged to 1 decimal place at 0.7%.

The correction and revisions to retail sales previous periods will not be reflected in the GDP monthly estimate, July 2025 bulletin, being published on 12 September, because no periods are open for revision in that publication.

These revisions to retail sales and any changes to data in wider industries will be incorporated into GDP as part of the GDP quarterly national accounts, UK April to June 2025 bulletin, published on 30 September 2025. This release also includes other improvements as part of the annual “Blue Book” publication. The compilation of GDP comprises many hundreds of data sources. Revisions and updates to input data are consequently taken all together, so one set of revisions may be offset once all data are processed.

Scheduled publication dates

This publication was delayed from 22 August to 5 September for further quality assurance of the seasonally adjusted data as part of our annual review. Our data collection periods of a four-week, four-week, five-week cycle adds further complexity to our seasonal adjustment process, given the need for alignment to calendar months. We will be working with retailers and plan to move to calendar months reporting periods to remove some of these complexities by the end of 2026.

Our next release will be published on 19 September, and the following editions will be published as part of our usual publication schedule.

Sales volumes fell by 0.6% in the three months to July 2025, compared with the three months to April 2025. This was mainly because of falls in food stores, sports equipment, games and toys stores, and household goods stores. These were partly offset by an increase in non-store retailing which are predominantly online retailers. This fall follows four months of consecutive three-month on three-month growth. The fall in the three months to July 2025 is because of higher monthly levels in March and April 2025. Sales volumes rose by 0.4%, compared with the three months to July 2024.

Sales volumes rose by 0.6% over the month during July 2025, following a 0.3% rise in June. Sales volumes rose by 1.1% over the year to July 2025.

Volumes were down by 2.2%, compared with their pre-coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic level in February 2020. These data are available in our Retail Sales Index dataset.

Sales volumes from non-store retailers, which mainly includes online retailers, rose by 2.5% in July 2025. This puts sales volumes at their highest level since February 2022. Retailers suggested that good weather and events such as the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) Women’s Euro 2025 tournament boosted sales.

Non-food stores sales volumes – the total of department, clothing, household, and other non-food stores – rose by 0.6% over the month. This was mainly because of clothing stores rising by 2.5% over the month and 5.5% over the year. This was the largest annual rise since January 2023, putting sales volumes at their highest since June 2023. Retailer comments suggested the rise was because of new products being launched, alongside the continued good weather.

The Met Office climate summaries reported that the UK had its fifth warmest July on record.

The amount spent online, known as “online spending values”, rose by 2.0% over the month to July 2025 and by 3.7% when comparing July 2025 with July 2024. Sales values rose by 2.2% when comparing the three months to July 2025 with the three months to April 2025.

Total spend – the sum of in-store and online sales – rose by 1.0% over the month. As a result, the proportion of sales made online rose from 27.5% in June 2025 to 27.8% in July 2025.

For July 2025, the Retail Sales Index (RSI) response rates were 65.5% based on returned forms, 2.9 percentage points above the initial estimate for June 2025. This accounted for 91.2% 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).

Seasonal adjustment

Seasonally adjusted estimates are derived by estimating and removing calendar effects (for example, Easter moving between March and June) and seasonal effects (for example, increased spending in December because of Christmas) from the non-seasonally adjusted estimates.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) uses the X-13ARIMA-SEATS approach to seasonal adjustment. Seasonal adjustment parameters are monitored closely and regularly reviewed. Improvements following our annual seasonal adjustment review have been implemented in this release. For more information, please see our seasonal adjustment methodology page.

Seasonal adjustment is applied at the industry level and the seasonally adjusted series are aggregated to create estimates by industry sector and total retail. As part of our quality assurance approach, residual seasonality checks are completed regularly by our time series analysis team on both the directly seasonally adjusted series and the indirectly derived aggregate time series. Based on current data, we find no residual seasonality in the main aggregate for monthly retail sales estimates.

Accredited official statistics

These accredited official statistics were independently reviewed by the Office for Statistics Regulation in June 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”.