Regional household final consumption expenditure, UK: 2009 to 2023

• England had the highest national expenditure per person (£24,339) of the four countries of the UK in 2023, followed by Scotland (£23,504), Northern Ireland (£22,913), and Wales (£22,670). 

• England also had the highest households' saving ratio (positive 8.9%) of the four countries of the UK in 2023; the lowest was in Wales (negative 7.3%).

• London had the highest national expenditure per person (£28,600) of the nine English regions in 2023, followed by the South East (£28,030); the lowest was in the North East (£19,842).

• London had the highest households' saving ratio (positive 23.9%) of the nine English regions in 2023, followed by the East of England (positive 10.5%); the lowest was in the South West (negative 3.8%).

• Inner London – West had the highest national expenditure per person (£41,865) of the International Territorial Level (ITL) 2 subregions of the UK in 2023, followed by Outer London – South (£33,604); the lowest was in the West Midlands (metropolitan county) (£18,598), followed by Leicestershire, Rutland and Northamptonshire (£19,249).

• Inner London – West had the highest households' saving ratio (positive 39.3%) of the ITL2 subregions in 2023, followed by Inner London – East (positive 29.3%); the lowest was in Cornwall and Isles of Scilly (negative 14.1%), followed by Hampshire and Isle of Wight (negative 13.1%).

These estimates of regional household final consumption expenditure (HFCE) have been developed in response to user needs and the review of economic statistics by Sir Charles Bean.

We have described the development of regional household expenditure in our Development of regional household expenditure measures article series, published in March 2025, July 2020, and September 2018. Our previous articles explain the concepts, data and methods to produce these estimates. This bulletin is the first of a regular annual release.

We measure regional HFCE using two distinct concepts: the national concept and the domestic concept. Each is calculated independently, based on data collected specifically for that approach. Under the national concept, we measure all spending by residents of a region, no matter where that spending occurs. This means it includes expenditure made both within the region and elsewhere in the UK or abroad. In contrast, the domestic concept captures all spending that takes place within a region, regardless of who is making the purchase. It therefore includes spending by foreign visitors and residents of other UK regions but excludes spending by the region's own residents when they are outside their home region.

These estimates are the only regional measures produced on a consistent basis across the whole UK. The devolved governments of Scotland and Northern Ireland also produce estimates of HFCE for their respective countries.

These estimates are consistent with the UK National Accounts, The Blue Book 2024 and our Regional gross disposable household income, UK: 1997 to 2023 bulletin. All the figures are in current market prices, which do not remove the effect of price inflation.

The full set of results, including a detailed commodity breakdown, can be found in our accompanying dataset.

National expenditure 

Table 1 shows total national expenditure on all goods and services and national expenditure per person for the International Territorial Level (ITL) 1 countries and regions of the UK in 2023. It also shows the percentage growth in spending per person between 2022 and 2023.

For comparison, the overall rate of inflation for this period was 6.8%, as shown in our Consumer Prices Index including owner occupiers' housing costs dataset.

London had the highest national expenditure per person in 2023, at £28,600, mainly owing to the higher housing costs in and around the capital.

The North East had the lowest spending per person in 2023, at £19,842. However, the North East had the greatest increase in spending per person between 2022 and 2023, at 10.2%. This growth was seen across a wide range of goods and services, with significant  growth in Restaurants and hotels. The lowest growth was in Scotland, at 1.7%.

Expenditure in the high-level categories of goods and services shows what the people in each country and region of the UK are spending their money on. Tables 2, 3, and 4 show these figures categorised by Classification of Individual Consumption According to Purpose (COICOP) standards on a per person basis for 2023, giving a comparison across different areas on a consistent basis.

Table 2 shows much higher housing costs in London and the South East of England. London has a much higher expenditure on education, more than double that of the average across all regions, but has the lowest spending per person on both recreation and culture, and alcohol and tobacco. Scotland has the lowest expenditure on education, just behind Yorkshire and The Humber and Wales.

Households' saving ratio

We can use these estimates of regional household final consumption expenditure to extend the regional household account from gross disposable household income (GDHI), and then derive the households' saving ratio. The saving ratio is the percentage of total available resources that remains after all spending has occurred. This is calculated by dividing gross saving by total resources. For the full calculation, see Section 6: Glossary.

Table 5 shows the stages in this derivation with data for 2023. The transaction codes shown (B.6g to B.8g) correspond to those used in the UK National Accounts.

A negative saving ratio indicates that the residents of the area have spent more money than they have available in that year, reducing the overall balance of savings that they have.

The households' saving ratio varies considerably across the UK. London's savings are more than twice that of the East of England, which were the second-highest savers. London had the highest value in 2023, at positive 23.9%, while the East of England saved positive 10.5%. The lowest levels of saving in 2023 were seen in Wales at negative 7.3%, followed by Northern Ireland at negative 5.4%.

Inter-regional spending

Having both domestic and national expenditure allows us to estimate the net household spending flows between countries and regions of the UK. These estimates are available for ITL1 and ITL2 levels in our accompanying dataset. We explain how we calculate these estimates in Section 6: Glossary.

Some International Territorial Level (ITL) 2 subregion boundaries have been reclassified since the release of our previous article. For more information, please see Section 7: Data sources and quality.

Figure 1 shows spending per person in 2023 for all subregions for a selection of Classification of Individual Consumption According to Purpose (COICOP) categories, taken from the full results. Users can examine spending of specific subregions relative to other UK regions by selecting the subregion of interest. Direct comparison between regions can be made because spending in the chart is shown per person. However, estimates at this level of geography can be volatile because of small sample sizes. Caution should be used in their interpretation and use in decision-making.

Figure 1: National expenditure per person by selected division

Classification of Individual Consumption According to Purpose (COICOP) divisions, International Territorial Level (ITL) 2 subregions, 2023

Notes:

1. The subregions "TLM2 Highlands and Islands" and "TLM9 Southern Scotland" are not shown in this chart. We are unable to calculate per person values for these regions because population estimates are not yet available.

There is a large difference between housing expenditure for Inner London - West and the other UK subregions. This means that the detail for other commodities becomes lost when all this information is presented together. Therefore, we have displayed subregional expenditure per person for COICOP category “housing” separately in Figure 2. Please note that the scale for Figure 2 is substantially larger than the scale used for the other six commodities in Figure 1.

Figure 2: National expenditure per person by division for housing

Classification of Individual Consumption According to Purpose (COICOP) divisions, International Territorial Level (ITL) 2 subregions, 2023

Notes:

1. The subregions "TLM2 Highlands and Islands" and "TLM9 Southern Scotland" are not shown in this chart. We are unable to calculate per person values for these regions because population estimates are not yet available.

The highest national expenditure per person of the ITL2 subregions of the UK in 2023 was in Inner London – West, at £41,865. This is around 1.7 times higher than the national expenditure per person for the whole of the UK in 2023, at £24,154. It was also around 1.5 times higher than the ITL1 region London (of which Inner London – West is a subregion).

Inner London – West has been the region with the highest national expenditure per person consistently from 2009 to 2023. The largest contribution to this spending in 2023 is on housing at £18,896. This accounts for around 45% of expenditure per person in Inner London – West. In comparison, housing forms 26% of 2023 national expenditure per person in the UK.

The subregions with the lowest national expenditure per person figures in 2023 were:

• West Midlands, at £18,598

• Leicestershire, Rutland and Northamptonshire, at £19,249

• Tees Valley, at £19,631

The ITL2 subregions with the highest households' saving ratios were:

• Inner London – West, at positive 39.3%

• Inner London – East, at positive 29.3%

• Outer London – West and North West, at positive 24.1%

Those with the lowest saving ratios were in Cornwall and Isles of Scilly, at negative 14.1%, and Hampshire and Isle of Wight, at negative 13.1%. These were 2 of the 15 regions with a negative households' saving ratio. This indicates that the residents of these areas typically spent more money than they had available from their income in 2023.

In addition to the ITL1 regions, net inter-regional trade flows were calculated at ITL2 level. This allows for further observation of net importing and exporting of goods on a subregional level. The results for these subregions are also included in our accompanying dataset.

Households' saving ratio

The saving ratio is the percentage of total available resources that remains after all spending has occurred. It is calculated by adding the adjustment for pensions to gross disposable income to get total household resources, then subtracting final consumption expenditure to get gross savings. Gross savings divided by total resources gives us the saving ratio.

Inter-regional spending flows

These are estimates of the net household spending flows between countries and regions of the UK. They are calculated as total domestic expenditure, less spending in the UK by foreign visitors, less total national expenditure, plus spending by UK residents abroad.

Full details of the data and methods used to produce regional household final consumption expenditure can be found in our Development of regional household expenditure measures article series, published in March 2025, July 2020, and September 2018.

Official statistics in development

These statistics are labelled as "official statistics in development". Until September 2023, these were called "experimental statistics". Read more about the change in the guide to official statistics in development.

These statistics are based on information from our Living Costs and Food Survey (LCF), our Annual Business Survey (ABS), and turnover from Value Added Tax (VAT) administrative data. We are developing how we collect and produce the data to improve the quality of these statistics.

Once the developments are complete, we will review the statistics with the Statistics Head of Profession. We will decide whether the statistics are of sufficient quality and value to be published as official statistics, or whether further development is needed. Production may be stopped if they are not of sufficient quality or value. Users will be informed of the outcome and any changes.

We value your feedback on these statistics. Contact us at regionalaccounts@ons.gov.uk.

Future development

To produce estimates for lower-level geographic areas, including local authorities across the UK, we will continue to pursue our work with anonymised credit and debit card data. These data will provide the level of coverage needed to produce reliable results for small areas and will also improve the quality and reliability of data for larger areas.

Recent changes to International Territorial Level geography

Recent updates to the International Territorial Level (ITL) 2 geography classification mean some subregions no longer align with the structure of our historical LCF survey data. We have modelled estimates for the new areas using historical data based on the previous geography and new data from the survey covering the latest two years. This modelling allows us to produce consistent time series for the new geography.

Users should be aware that these estimates carry greater uncertainty than those based directly on survey returns. They will likely be revised as we receive further data for the new geographic areas, allowing us to refine the model for earlier years. We will inform users of any major changes in future releases.

Data sources

Our main data source for estimates of national expenditure is our LCF. The LCF sample is designed and drawn at International Territorial Level (ITL) 2. Though the sample size for some ITL2 subregions is small, we believe the survey data are sufficient to produce reasonable quality results for a high-level commodity breakdown. The ITL2 subregions that are geographically contiguous with combined authorities have relatively large sample sizes, so results for these areas should be more reliable. ITL2 is the lowest level we can go without more comprehensive data sources on household spending at a local level.

The ABS collects important information from businesses, including retail sales of various commodities at the point of sale. This means that data are allocated to the regions where the spending takes place. It therefore provides data appropriate for the domestic concept measure of household expenditure.

The strength of the ABS is its coverage of businesses across the UK. It collects detailed information from a large sample size of around 80,000 businesses per year. Its main weakness, for our use, is that it cannot distinguish between sales to households and sales to business. We therefore need to assume that the proportion of total sales that represents business use is equal across all regions of the UK, which may or may not be a valid assumption.

The VAT dataset is a near-census of businesses across the UK. It includes information provided on administrative VAT returns to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC). Turnover from this source provides a useful alternative to ABS retail commodity data for the domestic concept measure of household expenditure, particularly for services that are not covered by the ABS data. Like the ABS data, there is no way to distinguish between sales to households and sales to businesses, so the same assumption must be applied to VAT data.

For categories covering energy consumption, we use detailed energy consumption data from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ). These are administrative data with local authority coverage. For the national concept, we use these data for electricity, gas, liquid and solid fuels. For the domestic concept we use these data for liquid and solid fuels, as we believe it is reasonable to assume that most spending takes place close to the home, from local suppliers.

In this bulletin, we also added bioenergy and wastes to the solid fuels category, in addition to the existing data covering domestic coal and domestic-manufactured solid fuels. We were able to do this using newly published data from DESNZ that distinguish between industrial and domestic bioenergy consumption, which allowed us to use the domestic consumption data in our processing. This improvement has been applied to the entire time series running from 2009 to 2023.

The data used to allocate the international tourism flows (spending in the UK by foreign visitors and spending abroad by UK residents) to regions of the UK come from our International Passenger Survey (IPS). The IPS was suspended because of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic between 16 March 2020 and 18 January 2021. We used the high-level estimates of travel and tourism spending that were produced for April to December 2020 using alternative sources.

There is also limited availability of IPS data at lower geographical levels from 2018 onwards, particularly for UK residents' spending abroad. We have therefore estimated some of our figures based on available data. There have been methodological changes to the IPS since 2020; for example, movements across the Irish land border are excluded from 2021 onwards. For more information on the IPS changes and plans, see our Travel and tourism review: final report and our Improving our travel and tourims statistics: August 2025 update article.

For other spending categories, we use a range of survey and administrative data, including our own sources of gross disposable household income (GDHI) and gross value added (GVA).