Index of Services, UK: July 2025

• Services output was estimated to have increased by 0.4% in the three months to July 2025, compared with the three months to April 2025. 

• In the three months to July 2025, 10 of the 14 sectors showed growth, with the main positive contributing sectors being "human health and social work activities" (up 1.5%) and "professional and scientific activities" (up 1.2%).

• In the three months to July 2025, 4 of the 14 sectors saw a fall, with the main negative contribution coming from "wholesale and retail trade" (down 1.3%).

• Monthly services output was estimated to have grown by 0.1% in July 2025; this follows an increase of 0.3% in June 2025 and an increase of 0.1% in May 2025.

• There were monthly increases in 7 of the 14 sectors in July 2025; the largest positive contributions came from "transportation and storage" (up 1.4%) and "human health and social work activities" (up 0.4%).

• The monthly increase in output in July 2025 was partially offset by monthly decreases in 6 of the 14 sectors (one sector saw flat growth); the largest negative contributions came from "information and communication" (down 0.7%) and "administrative and support service activities" (down 0.6%).

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

Response rates for July 2025

The response rates for July 2025 were 70.9%, based on forms returned. This accounted for 84.5% 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 (34.9%)     

• ONS Retail Sales Inquiry (4.8%)    

• ONS Government Expenditure (15.3%)     

• ONS Households' Expenditure (11.2%)     

• ONS Finance Expenditure (8.0%)     

• ONS Households and non-profit institutions serving households (1.9%) 

• 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 its GVA weight. Our IoS methodology provides 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 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 Services

In line with the National Accounts Revisions Policy, this release publishes data for July 2025 for the first time, with no revisions for this series.

Blue Book 2025 publication update

The 2025 annual UK National Accounts, also known as Blue Book 2025, will incorporate more recent survey and administrative information, together with methodological improvements to the full data time series. 

In addition, Blue Book 2025 includes a full time series of corrected Producer Price Indices (PPIs) and Services Producer Price Indices (SPPIs).

On 19 August 2025 we published our Blue Book 2025: advanced aggregate estimates article to give users details of the impact of the 2025 UK national accounts update on current price and chained volume measure estimates of gross domestic product (GDP) from 1997 to 2023.

Estimates using data for 2023 will be calculated for the first time using the supply and use tables (SUTs) framework, and our estimates for 2021 and 2022 have been improved using updated data. The SUT framework looks at the supply of goods and services, how they are used in the economy, and their associated prices in detail. As part of this process, the base year in our Blue Book 2025 dataset has been updated to 2023.

The next quarterly National Accounts release on 30 September 2025 will incorporate these revisions, and any data updates from 2023 onwards, in our official estimates. This aligns with our National Accounts Revisions Policy.

These revisions will be incorporated into our monthly IoS estimates in our release on 16 October 2025. Until this point, they will continue to have a reference and base year of 2022.

Non-market education output methodology

School attendance data is 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 IoS release includes the July 2025 retail sales growth rate, based on the correct seasonal adjustment. However, the correction and revisions to retail sales data in previous periods are not included in this release, in line with the National Accounts Revisions Policy.

Retail sales data are used to estimate growth of the retail trade (excluding motor vehicles and motorcycles) industry in the output measure of 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 one decimal place, at 0.7%.

These revisions to retail sales, and any changes to data in wider industries, will be incorporated into IoS 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.

These changes will be included in our monthly GDP release on 16 October 2025.

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) and export price indices (EPI) from January 2025 onwards. 

Correctly chain linked service producer price indices have also been included in our IoS dataset from April 2025 onwards. The quarterly SPPI estimates are splined to months for use in monthly IoS calculations. 

The full implementation of updated business prices data will be managed in line with the National Accounts Revisions Policy, with the full time series update being included in our GDP quarterly national accounts, UK: April to June 2025 bulletin and our Blue Book 2025 release. 

Further information on the chain linking error in the producer prices dataset was published on 10 July 2025 in our Growth rates of selected output and input for PPI and SPPI article. 

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.

The ONS uses 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 the indirectly derived aggregate time series.

This topic is explored further in Section 6 of our Assessing residual seasonality in published outputs article, published on 9 May 2025.