Business investment in the UK: October to December 2025 provisional results

• UK business investment decreased by 2.7% in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2025 and is 2.0% above the level seen in the same quarter of 2024.

• This release contains datasets for Quarter 4 2025 business investment provisional results; for further commentary on these data, please see our GDP first quarterly estimate, UK: October to December 2025 bulletin.

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, the data are open to revision from Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025 to Quarter 3 (July to Sept) 2025 for current price (CP) data and chained volume measure (CVM) estimates.

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

Data within this bulletin

All data within 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 4 (Oct to Dec) 2025, 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 62.5% for estimates used in the provisional release. From Quarter 1 2022 onwards, the average response rate at the provisional business investment release was 63.2%, 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 2013, an option to include a bias adjustment was introduced in the provisional estimate to help manage uncertainty around these early estimates. The bias adjustment for this provisional release is £1.6 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".