Index of Services, UK: August 2025

• Services output was estimated to have increased 0.4% in the three months to August 2025, compared with the three months to May 2025.

• 10 of the 14 sectors showed growth in the three months to August 2025, with the main positive contributing sectors being "human health and social work activities" and "administrative and support service activities", both up 1.4%.

• 4 of the 14 sectors saw a fall, with the main negative contribution coming from "wholesale and retail trade" (down 0.9%), in the three months to August 2025.

• Monthly services output was estimated to have shown flat growth (0.0%) in August 2025; this follows flat growth (0.0%) in July 2025 and an increase of 0.3% in June 2025.

• There were monthly increases in 7 of the 14 sectors in August 2025; the largest positive contributions came from "administrative and support service activities" (up 1.0%) and "human health and social work activities" (up 0.4%).

• There were monthly decreases in 5 of the 14 sectors in August 2025 (two sectors saw flat growth); the largest negative contribution came from "wholesale and retail trade" (down 0.5%).

All data related to the Index of Services are available on our Related data page.

Response rates for August 2025

The response rates for August 2025 were 73.4% based on forms returned. This accounted for 87.6% of total turnover coverage of the sample population. For further information, see our Current and historical Monthly Business Survey (MBS) (services) response rates dataset.

Data sources and collection

The Index of Services (IoS) is compiled using data from several different sources (share of overall economy based on latest gross value added (GVA) weights). These include the:

• Office for National Statistics (ONS) MBS (34.6%) 
• ONS Retail Sales Inquiry (4.5%) 
• ONS Government Expenditure (15.6%) 
• ONS Households' Expenditure (12.2%) 
• ONS Finance Expenditure (7.6%) 
• ONS Households and non-profit institutions serving households (1.7%)
• Other (3.6%)

The MBS data are published alongside this release in our MBS turnover of services industries dataset.

For further information on what is included within "other", please see our Gross domestic product (GDP(o)) data sources catalogue. 

The percentage of each data source is based on their gross value-added weight. Our IoS methods and sources pages provide more information on the data that underpin these statistics; of particular note is our GDP(o) data sources catalogue.

Value Added Tax (VAT) data are also included for small and medium-sized businesses to help inform estimates. For more information, see our VAT turnover data in National Accounts: background and methodology.

Quality and methodology

The data reported in IoS bulletins and datasets are estimates that are subject to uncertainty, for example, sampling variability and non-sampling error. For more information on these, see Section 2 of our Uncertainty and how we measure it for our surveys methodology.

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

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 Services

This release includes revisions for July 2025 for the first time and also incorporates revisions from January 1997 to June 2025 in line with the quarterly national accounts published on 30 September 2025, consistent with Blue Book 2025, as per the National Accounts Revision Policy. 

Table 1 shows the revisions to Index of Services (IoS) and its main sectors from January 2025 to July 2025 since the last publication on 12 September 2025.

The larger revisions in 2025 for sections G and I mainly come from "Division 47 - retail sale, except motor vehicles and motorcycles". This is explained further in the Retail sales seasonal adjustment subsection.

Non-market education output methodology

School attendance data are used as our source to estimate education output by the non-market sector. Education is considered to be provided across the whole year and so school holidays, or school leavers, do not reduce output over the summer. As attendance levels are not available over the summer, the June 2025 value will be carried forward. When data are available for September 2025, the July and August 2025 estimates will be recalculated based on the change in attendance between June and September.

Retail sales seasonal adjustment

During our scheduled annual review of Retail sales seasonal adjustment, as part of our quality assurance, we identified a problem with a file used in our seasonal adjustment model to adjust for our survey reference periods not aligning precisely with calendar months. Further details and a full time series using the correct seasonal adjustment model can be found in our Retail Sales, Great Britain: July 2025 bulletin.

This Index of Services release includes the corrected retail sales data for the full time series. 

Pausing of Producer Prices publications

Business prices data with corrected chain linking methods have been used in the Index of Services (IoS) dataset for producer price indices (PPI), import prices indices (IPI) export price indices (EPI), and service producer price indices (SPPI) for all periods in this release. The quarterly SPPI estimates are splined to months for use in IoS calculations.

Any further updates to price data following the restart of the monthly business prices publication will be incorporated in GDP estimates in line with our national accounts revisions policy. 

Further information on the chain linking error in the producer prices dataset are detailed in our Methods update for Producer Price Indices (PPI) and Service Produce Prices Indices (SPPI) published on 10 July 2025. 

Seasonal adjustment

The monthly estimates of IoS 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.

IoS 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 regularly reviewed. For more information, please see our seasonal adjustment methodology page.

In our IoS estimates seasonal adjustment is applied at the industry level and the seasonally adjusted series are aggregated to create estimates by sector and total IoS 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 also 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.

Office for National Statistics (ONS), released 16 October 2025, ONS website, statistical bulletin, Index of Services: August 2025