Business investment in the UK: April to June 2026 provisional results

• UK business investment increased by 1.7% in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2026 and is 0.8% above the level seen in the same quarter in 2025.

• This release contains datasets for Quarter 2 2026 business investment provisional results; for further commentary on these data, please see our Gross domestic product (GDP) first quarterly estimate bulletin, linked in Section 4: Related links.

• There are no revisions to business investment in this release because of the regular National Accounts Revisions Policy; headline business investment and gross fixed capital formation (GFCF) revisions up to 2024 will be published in our Blue Book 2026: GDP impacts and expenditure components article on 20 August, and any additional updates to data from 2025 onwards will be published in our Business investment in the UK: April to June 2026 revised results bulletin on 30 September.

Quality and methodology information on strengths, limitations, appropriate uses, and how the data were created is available in our Business investment in the UK quality and methods guide.

Revisions

In line with our National Accounts Revisions Policy, there are no periods open for revision in this publication. We will include revisions to current price and chained volume business investment and gross fixed capital formation (GFCF) quarterly growth up to 2024 in our upcoming Blue Book 2026: GDP impacts and expenditure components article, publishing on 20 August 2026. These revisions, and those for 2025 onwards, will be fully incorporated into our business investment in the UK release, covering up to Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2026, which will be published on 30 September 2026.

The headline GFCF and business investment estimates that will be published on 20 August will incorporate several methodological and data improvements. These include:

• updated methods for estimating transfer costs associated with non-financial assets

• revised Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) data used in own-account software estimates

• improved data sources for artistic originals

We will also refine the industry-level allocation of research and development (R&D) GFCF, without affecting top-level aggregates. Together, these changes are designed to improve the accuracy, coverage and quality of non-financial asset estimates within the UK National Accounts. These revisions will be incorporated into our Quarter 2 2026 business investment release and related GFCF estimates.

We analyse and explain revisions performance for business investment up to and including the release of the Blue Book 2025-consistent dataset in our Business investment in the UK revisions in Blue Book: 2025 article, published on 30 September 2025.

Data in this bulletin

All data in this bulletin, unless specified, are presented in chained volume measure (CVM), otherwise known as "real". This means the effect of price changes has been removed (in other words, the data are deflated).

In Quarter 2 2026, the Quarterly Acquisitions and Disposals of Capital Assets Survey (QCAS) – the largest data source for gross fixed capital formation (GFCF) and business investment – had a response rate of 62.9% for estimates used in the provisional release. From Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2022 onwards, the average response rate at the provisional business investment release was 63.0%, and the average response rate at the revised business investment release was 77.4%.

Adjustments

Large capital expenditure tends to be reported later in the data collection period than smaller capital expenditure. This means that larger expenditures are often included in the revised (Month 3) results but are not reported in time for the provisional (Month 2) results. This can result in upward revisions in the later estimates for business investment and GFCF.

Following investigation of the impact of this effect, from Quarter 3 (July to Sept) 2013, we introduced an option to include a bias adjustment in the provisional estimate to help manage uncertainty around these early estimates. The bias adjustment for this provisional release is £2.6 billion.

Accredited official statistics

These accredited official statistics were independently reviewed by the Office for Statistics Regulation in September 2013. They comply with the standards of trustworthiness, quality and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics and should be labelled "accredited official statistics".