Consumer trends, UK: July to September 2024

• In Quarter 3 (July to September) 2024, household spending growth (adjusted for inflation) was positive 0.5% compared with Quarter 2 (April to June) 2024.

• The largest positive contribution to growth in Quarter 3 2024 was from housing (showing a 0.8% increase compared with Quarter 2 2024).

• The largest negative contribution to growth in Quarter 3 2024 was from transport (showing a 0.5% decrease compared with Quarter 2 2024).

• Household spending was 1.5% higher than the same quarter a year ago (Quarter 3 2023).

The quarterly consumer trends data are typically published around 90 days after the end of the quarter.

This release contains data that are consistent with the UK National Accounts, The Blue Book: 2024, published on 31 October 2024. For this reason, data for all periods in this release are subject to revision in line with the National Accounts Revisions Policy.

The Blue Book is the UK's annual compendium of national accounts data and incorporates a number of improvements to methods and sources into the UK National Accounts. Details of improvements introduced in Blue Book 2024 that affect household expenditure and revisions to our previous bulletin can be found in our User guide to consumer trends.

The reference year and last base year for all chained volume measure estimates is 2022.

Further information on the latest developments and changes implemented in Blue Book 2024 can be found in our Proposed changes to be implemented in Blue Book and Pink Book 2024 article, released in December 2023. These changes were introduced in our September 2024 Consumer trends release, which was published alongside Blue Book.

We have produced an update to the Classification of Individual Consumption by Purpose (COICOP) to Classification of Products by Activity (CPA) mapper for 2020.

Household final consumption expenditure (HHFCE) includes spending on goods and services, except for:

• buying or extending a house

• investment in valuables (for example, paintings and antiques)

• purchasing second-hand goods

Explanations for these exceptions and the related concepts are available in our Consumer trends QMI.

Quality

More quality and methodology information on strengths, limitations, appropriate uses, and how the data were created is available in our Consumer trends QMI.

Impact of coronavirus (COVID-19)

From Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2020, estimates of Household Final Consumption Expenditure (HHFCE), along with other components of gross domestic product (GDP), are subject to more uncertainty than was the case previously. This is because of the challenges we faced in collecting the data under government-imposed public health restrictions. In the case of HHFCE, these challenges were compounded by the suspension of data collection for the International Passenger Survey (IPS) between March 2020 and January 2021, and the temporary suspension of the Living Costs and Food survey (LCF) between 16 March and 14 April 2020.

Accredited official statistics

These accredited official statistics were independently reviewed by the Office for Statistics Regulation in January 2012. They comply with the standards of trustworthiness, quality and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics and should be labelled "accredited official statistics".