Index of Production, UK: January 2026

• Production output was estimated to have increased by 1.3% during the three months to January 2026, compared with the three months to October 2025.

•  There were positive contributions from two sectors in the three months to January 2026; "manufacturing" (up 1.5%) and "electricity and gas" (up 2.2%), these were partially offset by "water supply and sewerage" (down 0.5%), and "mining and quarrying" (down 0.1%).

• Overall, 8 of the 13 subsectors in "manufacturing" increased during the three months to January 2026; the largest positive subsector was "transport equipment'' (up 8.1%), contributing approximately two thirds of the rise; within this, "motor vehicles" increased by 17.5% as the industry recovered from a cyber incident in September 2025.

• Monthly production output was estimated to have decreased by 0.1% in January 2026; this follows a fall in December 2025 (down 0.9%), and a rise in November 2025 (up 1.3%).

• The fall in monthly production output in January 2026 was because of weaknesses in "mining and quarrying" (down 3.2%), and partially from "electricity and gas" (down 0.3%), these were moderately offset by "water supply and sewerage" (up 1.9%) and "manufacturing" (up 0.1%).

• The fall in "mining and quarrying" (down 3.2%) was entirely caused by "extraction of crude petroleum and natural gas" (down 4.6%).

• Only 5 of the 13 manufacturing subsectors saw increased output, with the largest positive contributions coming from "transport equipment" (up 4.0%), "other manufacturing" (up 4.5%) and "food products" (up 2.2%); the largest three negative contributions came from "machinery and equipment" (down 7.7%), "electrical equipment" (down 9.0%) and "computer, electronic and optical products" (down 2.8%).

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 in from any location and submit their data at an appropriate time.

Value Added Tax (VAT) data have also been included for 64 production industries for small and medium-sized businesses from January 2018. 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 January 2026 

MBS response rates were 74.3% for January 2026, based on forms returned. This accounted for 85.9% 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 January 2026 for the first time, with no other periods open for revision.

In our next IoP publication on 16 April 2026, we will open for revision back to January 2024. This release will incorporate the revisions from our GDP quarterly national accounts, UK bulletin, published on 31 March 2026.

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.

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 methodology, updated on 30 September 2025.

Based on our quality assurance as part of this publication, there is no statistically significant residual seasonality in our aggregate estimates for the IoP in the period from January 1997 to January 2026.