Public service productivity, quarterly, UK: April to June 2025

• Our annualised estimates show upward revisions to total public service productivity for 2023 and 2024; in 2024, total public service productivity was 3.0% lower than the 2019 level (compared with 4.2% below, as previously published).

• Healthcare productivity has been revised for 2023 and 2024; healthcare public service productivity was 7.8% lower than the 2019 level in 2024 (compared with 8.8% below, as previously published).

• Revisions are mainly because of updated national accounts data and methods developments, as recommended in the National Statistician's Independent Review of the Measurement of Public Services Productivity; these align us more closely to national accounts best practice and our annual publication.

• Developments include replacing our "contribution to growth" aggregation method with a chain-linking method, replacing several deflators with those consistent with our annual publication, and refining our confidence interval methodology.

• Total public service productivity in the UK fell by 0.7% in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025, compared with Quarter 2 2024, and healthcare productivity fell by 1.5% over the same period.

• Our quarterly estimates are Official Statistics in Development and are subject to revision as more timely data become available; we are continually developing these estimates and refining our understanding of seasonal patterns, following the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

Our quarterly estimates are official statistics in development and provide a short-term, timely indicator of total public service and healthcare productivity. These statistics take no further account of changes to the quality of public services in periods beyond the latest statistics published for 2022 in our annual total public service productivity article, which are accredited official statistics. Methodological differences between the annual and quarterly estimates, and a description of the quarterly data, can be found in our recently updated Sources and methods for public service productivity estimates methodology.

We have incorporated data consistent with the UK National Accounts, The Blue Book 2025 publication, and replaced our "contribution to growth" aggregation method with a chain-linking method that is more consistent with national accounts best practice. We have also replaced several deflators to be more consistent with our annual estimates. These new data and improvements have resulted in an upwards revision to total public service productivity in 2023 and 2024 (see Section 4: Revisions to public service productivity estimates).

This section focuses on the annualised estimates of our quarterly total and healthcare public service productivity, inputs, and output, which are official statistics in development. The annualised estimates are based on a quarterly annualised growth rate (QAGR) approach, which produces "nowcasted" estimates for 2023 and 2024.

Annualised inputs and output estimates are derived by averaging seasonally adjusted index values across four quarters of a year. These are used to calculate productivity growth rates, which are applied to 2022 accredited official statistics to estimate 2023 and 2024 figures. This method is used in our Developing nowcast methodologies for public service productivity, UK article.

We also make pre-pandemic annual comparisons, recognising the impact the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic had on public services. Inputs rose in 2020, reflecting the extra resources provided to public services to deal with the pandemic. Conversely, output fell in 2020, as many services were delivered in a different way than in 2019, with additional costs and mandatory restrictions present for certain services.

Annualised total public service and healthcare productivity

Figures 1 and 2 combine our accredited annual estimates from 1997 to 2022 with official statistics in development for 2023 and 2024, derived using the QAGR approach. Figure 1 presents total public service productivity, inputs and output annual estimates, while Figure 2 presents the same for healthcare only.

Total public service productivity growth for 2023 has been revised up from a fall of 0.2% to growth of 0.9%. This was caused by:

• downward revisions to total inputs (from 1.8% to 1.1%), resulting from updated healthcare inputs data
• upward revisions to output (from 1.6% to 2.1%), resulting from updated social protection data

Total public service productivity for 2024 was also revised up, from 0.1% to 0.3% growth. This reflects downward revisions to inputs growth (from 3.3% to 3.0%) across several service areas (healthcare, education, social protection, and justice and fire), but also because of methodological improvements introduced in this release. Total output growth remained unchanged.

Though this is the fourth consecutive year of total public service productivity growth, it is the third consecutive year where growth has slowed. Total public service productivity growth of 0.3% in 2024 is below the 0.7% average annual growth rate in the decade up to 2019.

Table 1 compares our latest annualised total public service productivity estimates against 2019 levels. Annualised quarterly estimates show that total public service productivity in 2024 remained below pre-pandemic levels (3.0% lower than in 2019), which was less than previously published (4.2%).

Overall, previously published data estimated a slower post-pandemic rate of recovery compared with those shown in this release. See Section 4: Revisions to public service productivity estimates for further information for an explanation of these revisions.

Healthcare public service productivity growth for 2023 has been revised up from 0.6% to 2.2%. This was caused by downward revisions to healthcare inputs (from 0.1% growth to negative 1.4% growth) mostly because of updated healthcare inputs data (see Section 4: Revisions to public service productivity estimates). Output growth was revised up from 0.7% to 0.8%.

In contrast, healthcare public service productivity growth for 2024 was revised down, from 0.7% growth to 0.0%. This was because of upward revisions to inputs growth (from 5.2% to 5.4%) and downward revisions to output growth (from 5.9% to 5.5%). This is the third consecutive year of slowing healthcare productivity growth, falling below the 1.3% average annual growth rate in the decade up to 2019.

Healthcare productivity in 2024 remained below pre-pandemic levels (7.8% lower than in 2019), less than previously published (8.8%).

Confidence intervals (CIs) surrounding our nowcasted total public service and healthcare productivity estimates for 2023 and 2024 are included in Tables 3 and 4, providing a statistical measure of uncertainty attached to these annualised growth estimates. The interval width is determined by historical differences between the growth rates of quarterly and annual estimates. As of this release, we have decided to exclude 2019 to 2022 productivity estimates in our calculation of confidence intervals. This is because growth during this period is not reflective of historical and underlying variance between our quarterly and annual estimates. As a result, the interval widths across our confidence intervals have narrowed compared with previously published estimates.

Nowcasted estimates are official statistics in development and should be treated with caution until our 2023 and 2024 annual accredited estimates become available. Even with these refined confidence intervals, we are unable to say with certainty whether there was growth or contraction in total public service productivity in 2023 and 2024.

Similarly, we are unable to say with confidence whether there was growth or contraction in healthcare public service productivity in 2023 and 2024. Some elements of our estimates (such as current price expenditure from government accounts on healthcare inputs) come with greater certainty following the latest UK National Accounts, The Blue Book 2025 revisions. However, other elements (including different deflators, time lag in certain sources, and methodological differences between our annual and quarterly dataset) create large confidence intervals.

In accordance with our National Accounts Revisions Policy, this release contains data that are consistent with the UK National Accounts, The Blue Book 2025, which was released on 31 October 2025. These data are the cause of most of the revisions to total public service productivity in this release (as shown in Figure 3).

The main cause of total public service productivity revisions was updated national accounts data affecting healthcare inputs, particularly intermediate consumption, across 2023 and 2024. These were revised following the replacement of provisional data with out-turn financial year expenditure data. Furthermore, updated data from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) and from the devolved administrations on residential care resulted in revisions to social protection output, affecting 2023 data.

Other revisions in this release are because of the following improvements made to how we measure quarterly public service productivity.

We have replaced our "contribution to growth" aggregation method for inputs with a chain-linking method. This makes us more consistent with national accounts best practice and our output measures.

Using a chain-linking method has generally caused downward revisions to inputs growth throughout our time series by an average of 0.1 percentage points per quarter. This resulted in upward revisions to productivity growth by the same average amount. This development does not affect output, as these are already produced using a chain-linking method. More information about this methodology can be found in Chain-linking methods used within the UK National Accounts.

We have replaced several deflators to bring us closer to those used in our annual publication. Our health deflators are more consistent with NHS Cost Inflation Indexes used in our annual publication, and we now apply a stepped quarterly path to annual deflators. We have also aligned our education deflators with those in our annual publication. Overall, these had a small effect on inputs growth. This development does not affect output.

We undertook a seasonal adjustment review of our data given the latest developments, reducing residual seasonality in our back series. On average, this had no effect to growth of inputs, output, or productivity across a year. More information on our seasonal adjustment is available in Section 8: Data sources and quality.

More detailed information on revisions to productivity, inputs, and output, is available in Tables 5 and 6 of our accompanying dataset.

We focus here on movements between the quarter and the same quarter a year ago, instead of comparing with the previous quarter, because these better reflect underlying productivity trends and minimise effects of short-term volatility.

Total public service productivity in the UK was estimated to have fallen by 0.7% in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025 compared with the same quarter in 2024. Over this period, inputs and output grew by 2.5% and 1.8%, respectively. This is the largest fall in total public service productivity since Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2022, when it fell by 2.0%. Total output growth continues to slow down, however inputs have risen sharply. There is a degree of uncertainty with data in recent quarters, given the lag between departmental accounts being finalised and data feeding through to the national accounts, on which our estimates are predominantly based. Following the introduction of our new aggregation method, we will continue to review our seasonal adjustment model to ensure coherence with national accounts.

Quarter-on-previous-year healthcare productivity estimates

Healthcare accounts for approximately 39% of total UK public expenditure, and typically leads trends at the total level. It includes activities related to:

• elective and non-elective services

• general practitioners (GPs)

• prescription drugs

• outpatient

• mental health

• community health

• accident and emergency care

Estimates are predominantly based on national accounts data and align to GDP quarterly national accounts, UK: April to June 2025.

Healthcare productivity was estimated to have fallen by 1.5% in Quarter 2 2025 compared with the same quarter in 2024, as inputs growth (2.9%) outpaced output growth (1.3%). Healthcare inputs growth had been slowing down for three consecutive quarters until the latest quarter, while healthcare output grew at its slowest pace since Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2023.

The Office for National Statistics's (ONS's) health inputs estimates differ from NHS England estimates because we include spending from Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) to remain consistent with coverage across the national accounts. Excluding spending from ICBs would bring the ONS health inputs growth in the latest quarter closer to health inputs growth reported by NHS England.

A degree of caution should be applied to data from recent quarters because of known lags in the national accounting process, where the ONS estimates may not be reflective of more timely departmental accounts. The ONS continues to collaborate with NHS England to minimise differences in coverage and timeliness between our estimates on healthcare inputs and output.

Deflator

A price index used to remove inflation effects from current price estimates of expenditure to provide a volume estimate.

Direct output measurement

Using a cost-weighted activity index to estimate the non-quality adjusted output of a service provided, such as the number of students in state schools, adjusted for attendance to produce an estimate of total hours of schooling delivered each year. Differs from indirect output measurement, where output is assumed equal to inputs.

Intermediate inputs

Also referred to as "goods and services", or "intermediate consumption" (the national accounts term). Intermediate inputs include goods and services used up in the provision of a public service, such as utilities, energy, professional services, and medical supplies, among others.

Public services

These are services delivered by or paid for by government (central or local). If paid for by the government, they may be delivered by a private body, for example, the provision of nursery places by the private sector, where these places were funded by the government.

Quality adjustment

A statistical estimate of the change in the quality of a public service, using an appropriate metric, such as safety in prisons as part of the public order and safety adjustment.

Service area

The way we refer to the breakdown of public services into seven areas, closely following standard industrial classification (SIC) codes.

Standard industrial classification

The industrial classification applied to the collection and publication of a wide range of economic statistics.

Data sources

We use different sources and methods to produce our official statistics in development quarterly statistics and our annual accredited official statistics. 

This bulletin uses expenditure data from quarterly UK National Accounts, split into seven categories: 

• healthcare 

• education 

• social protection 

• justice and fire 

• military defence 

• central government services 

• local government services 

Data sources and methods differ from the annual publication, depending on data availability and appropriateness on a quarterly or annual basis. For example, some inputs measures that are available on an annual basis as direct measures are not available on a quarterly basis. These missing quarterly direct input measures may only be obtainable using indirect measures (deflated expenditure).

Our annual total public service productivity statistics (accredited official statistics) also use different deflators to estimate volumes of inputs other than those used in this release. As such, estimates are not directly comparable between the quarterly and annual publications. Estimates of productivity, inputs and output up to 2022 are reported on an annual basis and use data from our Public service productivity: total, UK, 2022 article. Further information about our annual accredited official statistics can be found in our Public service productivity: total, UK, quality and methodology information (QMI).

Seasonal adjustment

Our quarterly estimates of public service productivity contain systematic calendar related variation therefore for comparability we apply seasonal adjustment. Please see our seasonal adjustment publication for more information. For our quarterly estimates we use the X11 algorithm in the X-13 ARIMA-SEATS software to perform seasonal adjustment.

The non-seasonally adjusted data on public service productivity, particularly inputs, show a different seasonal pattern than earlier data since 2023. This is because of policies and measures adopted by government departments following the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. This new seasonality was not properly captured by the seasonal adjustment model for inputs, which produced estimates that do not appear to fully reflect the current economic scenario.

To revise the seasonal adjustment fully requires more quarters of data post-COVID-19 to enable re-estimation of the trend of the new seasonality. For this reason, supported by experts on seasonal adjustment, we previously treated data on healthcare inputs from Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2020 until the latest quarter as outliers, reflecting the effect of COVID-19 and subsequent effects.

However, from this release onwards, we now regard Quarter 2 2020 to Quarter 2 2022 as outliers. This reflects advice from time series experts given the current data and length of time series available since 2022.

We have also introduced indirect seasonal adjustment consistent with other areas of national accounts. This step uses the chain-linking aggregation approach to aggregate the seasonally adjusted service areas and ensures additivity across our service area estimates and the total. These estimates will be subject to continued assessment as new data become available, and as we work to further align ourselves with national accounts best practice.

Measuring public service productivity

These estimates are not a measure of the productivity of an individual worker within the public sector. They instead reflect the volume of services delivered to end users, relative to the volume of total inputs required to deliver these services.

Productivity will increase when more output is being produced for each unit of inputs used. Estimates of inputs, output, and productivity are given both as growth rates between consecutive periods and as indices, showing the cumulative trend over time. 

For total UK public services, estimates of inputs are made up of aggregated series for individual public services, weighted together by their relative share of total expenditure on public services in current price (expenditure weight).

Inputs include labour, goods and services, social transfers in kind, and consumption of fixed capital. Expenditure data, used to estimate most inputs growth, are taken from our GDP quarterly national accounts, UK: April to June 2025.

Output in our productivity estimates reflects total general government final consumption expenditure (GGFCE). The quarterly national accounts produce estimates of government output, based on direct measures where they are available, and indirect measures where they are not. 

Inputs for healthcare are calculated from the volume growth of healthcare labour inputs weighted according to its current price expenditure share relative to other health inputs components. We adopted the same approach to calculate the intermediate consumption, capital, and social transfer in kind (STIK). The sum of these components leads to the healthcare inputs volume growth in each period.

Our estimates of intermediate consumption, capital, and STIK are based on national accounts sources. Labour growth is based on our public sector employment data (direct implied expenditure), and deflated bank staff implied expenditure.

Our quarterly data do not currently account for staff absenteeism in our labour estimates. However, our annual Public service productivity: total, UK article does account for this. More information on the differences in method and sources used in our quarterly and annual estimates of public service productivity can be found in our Public service productivity QMI.

Our public service quarterly output volume measure for healthcare is estimated based on the growth in the following types of activities in England, which have timely data collections:

• elective and non-elective treatments

• hospital outpatient first and follow-up appointments

• emergency care

• critical care services

• ambulance attendances

• community health services

• mental health treatments

• community prescribed drugs

• general practitioner (GP) consultations

• dental services

• ophthalmic services

• NHS phone and website services

More information can be found in our Improvements to healthcare volume output in the quarterly national accounts methodology.

Quarterly healthcare output growth is based on available data for a subset of services in England. Because of limited data, these indicators are assumed to reflect overall healthcare trends. Longer-term estimates are adjusted when more complete annual data become available.

Public service productivity uses the expenditure of public services, which defines GGFCE. It includes services where employees are central or local government, as well as publicly funded independent sector providers. This differs from the public sector, which includes public corporations but excludes publicly funded independent sector providers, to avoid double-counting. 

Public service productivity is measured differently to labour productivity and multi-factor productivity and is not directly comparable. It reflects the volume of services delivered to end users, relative to the volume of total inputs (which include labour, intermediate consumption, and capital). The measure is dominated by healthcare and education services because of their relative size. 

These estimates should be considered a first estimate of public service productivity. The Office for National Statistics, together with HM Treasury and other government departments, will continue to develop and improve its methods, which may lead to revisions of these preliminary estimates.

Recommendations from National Statistician's Independent Review of the Measurement of Public Services Productivity

We continue to make incremental improvements to this release and accompanying datasets, consistent with recommendations set out in the National Statistician's Independent Review of the Measurement of Public Services Productivity. This release has made progress on:

• replacing the current "contribution to growth" compilation method with "chain volume measures", and implementing reconciliation of the quarterly estimates with the annual estimates each year to align with the UK national accounts protocols and improve coherence and understanding for users (see recommendation 18)

• applying the Quarterly cumulative Average Growth Rates (QAGR) method to provide timelier nowcast estimates for annual estimates as further research is undertaken to evaluate the efficacy of alternative methods in the light of the coronavirus pandemic (see recommendation 19)

We will continue to work on remaining recommendations, including:

• account for available quality adjustment data and, where this is not possible, keep nowcasting models under annual review to provide the most accurate and timely data possible (see Recommendation 16)

• proceed with best practice improvements to align quarterly and annual production statistics (see Recommendation 20)