Index of Production, UK: December 2025

• Production output was estimated to have increased by 1.2% during Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2025 compared with Quarter 3 (July to Sept) 2025.

• In Quarter 4 2025, production output increased in all four main sectors; the largest positive contributor came from “manufacturing” (up 0.9%), supported by “electricity and gas” (up 3.1%), “mining and quarrying” (up 1.4%), and “water supply and sewerage” (up 0.7%).

• Overall, 7 of the 13 subsectors in “manufacturing” increased during Quarter 4 2025; the largest positive contributions came from “other manufacturing” (up 5.3%), “machinery and equipment” (up 4.6%), and “computer, electronic and optical products” (up 3.3%).

• In contrast to the quarterly rise, monthly production output was estimated to have decreased by 0.9% in December 2025; this follows a rise in November 2025 (up 1.3%) and October 2025 (up 1.7%).

• The fall in monthly production output in December 2025 resulted from widespread weakness, with a decrease in the following four sectors: “manufacturing” (down 0.5%), “electricity and gas” (down 1.7%), “water supply and sewerage” (down 2.4%), and “mining and quarrying” (down 0.7%).

• In total, 8 of the 13 manufacturing subsectors saw a monthly decrease in December 2025; the largest negative contributions at sub-section level came from “basic pharmaceuticals” (down 2.6%), “food products” (down 1.4%), and "chemical products” (down 5.0%).

• Annual production output was estimated to have increased 0.2% in 2025; this is the first annual rise in production since 2021.

All data related to the Index of Production (IoP) are available on our Related data page.

The Index of Production (IoP) uses data from a variety of sources. It is calculated by taking turnover and removing the effect of price changes, or by using direct volume estimates.

Most of these data are collected as “turnover values” through the Monthly Business Survey (MBS). Direct volume series are also collected by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), and the International Steel Statistics Bureau (ISSB) for steel industries.

The MBS is fully online. Business owners can log on from any location and submit their data at an appropriate time.

From January 2018, Value Added Tax (VAT) data have also been included for 64 production industries for small-and medium-sized businesses. More information is available in our VAT turnover data in National Accounts: background and methodology.

A comprehensive list of the IoP source data can be found in our Gross domestic product (GDP) data sources catalogue.

Response rates for December 2025

MBS response rates were 72.7% for December 2025, based on forms returned. This accounted for 87.0% of total turnover coverage of the sample population. For further information, see our Monthly Business Survey (production) response rates dataset.

Quality and methodology

The data reported in IoP bulletins and datasets are estimates that are subject to uncertainty, such as sampling variability and non-sampling error. More information is available in Section 2 of our Uncertainty and how we measure it for our surveys web page.

More quality and methodology information (QMI) on strengths, limitations, appropriate uses, and how the data were created is available in our Index of Production, UK QMI.

Accredited official statistics

These accredited official statistics were independently reviewed by the Office for Statistics Regulation in April 2014. They comply with the standards of trustworthiness, quality and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics and should be labelled “accredited official statistics”.

Revisions to Index of Production

This release gives data for December 2025 for the first time, with January 2025 to November 2025 open for revision because of late and updated source data, since our last publication on 15 January 2026.

Table 1 shows the revisions to Index of Production (IoP) and its main sectors from January 2025 to November 2025, since our last release on 15 January 2026.

The revisions in "mining and quarrying" and "electricity and gas" are largely from updated source data from DESNZ, since the last monthly release.

Please note, in our next monthly gross domestic product (GDP) bulletin publishing on 13 March 2026, we will be revising data from January 2024 to December 2025. This is so we can make updates to non-market education and retail trade, excluding motor vehicles and trailers. These will also be incorporated into the quarterly National Accounts releases publishing on 31 March 2026, which will have revisions from January 2024.

Seasonal adjustment

The monthly estimates of IoP are seasonally adjusted. Seasonal adjustment is the process of removing the variations associated with the time of year, or the arrangement of the calendar, from a data time series.

IoP estimates, as for many data time series, are difficult to analyse using raw data because seasonal effects dominate short-term movements. Identifying and removing the seasonal component leaves the trend and irregular components.

We use the X-13-ARIMA-SEATS approach to seasonal adjustment. Seasonal adjustment parameters are monitored closely and are regularly reviewed. For more information, please see our Seasonal adjustment methodology page.

In our IoP estimates, seasonal adjustment is applied at the industry level. The seasonally adjusted series are aggregated to create estimates by sector and total IoP output. As part of our quality assurance approach, residual seasonality checks are regularly completed by our time series analysis team on both the directly seasonally adjusted series and the indirectly derived aggregate time series.

This topic is explored further in our Assessing residual seasonality in published outputs article updated on 30 September 2025.