UK GDP History Is Being Rewritten as ONS Overhauls Services Measurement

The Office for National Statistics is revising the historical profile of the UK economy after a major upgrade to how it measures services, changing both the estimated size of gross domestic product and the contribution made by individual industries. Under the latest Blue Book 2026 estimates, nominal GDP in 2024 is now put at £2.905 trillion, 0.5% above the previous estimate.

The cumulative increase in real GDP between 1997 and 2024 has also been revised to 61.7%, up from 59.2%. Average annual real growth over 1998 to 2024 remains 1.8% when rounded to one decimal place, so the change is less about a radically different long-run growth rate than a series of small revisions that compound over time.

The ONS said in its Blue Book 2026 impact analysis that the largest revisions come from integrating the Annual Survey of Goods and Services into the national accounts for the first time. The agency is also changing how it measures actual and imputed rents, updating energy data and incorporating newer survey and administrative information for recent years.

A broader services survey changes the historical map

The central change is the use of the Annual Survey of Goods and Services, or ASGS, to obtain more detailed information about the products made by businesses classified in service industries. Until now, the national accounts had less granular product-level information for much of the service economy than for manufacturing, where detailed product surveys have long been available.

The ASGS is designed to show not only a company’s main activity but also the secondary products it produces. That distinction matters because a business classified as a service company can also manufacture goods, publish software or provide other products outside the activity normally associated with its industry. When the ONS incorporated the new data into its supply-and-use framework, it found more of this secondary production than previously captured.

The result is not simply a larger estimate for one service category. The new information changes how output is allocated across industries and how the supply of products is matched with their uses elsewhere in the economy. In 2023, the estimated value of secondary production across industries was revised up 35.1% at the broad industry-section level, raising secondary production from 6.3% to 8.4% of total output. Business support services made the largest contribution to that revision, followed by professional, scientific and technical activities, wholesale and retail, transport and storage, and other services.

Some of the reallocation moves activity away from manufacturing. The ONS found that a substantial amount of manufactured goods is produced by businesses whose main classification is in the service sector. That means the total amount of manufactured goods can be revised upward even as a smaller share of that production is attributed to manufacturing businesses themselves. In 2024, manufacturing accounted for 13.1% of total output but 8.6% of total gross value added, reflecting the industry’s heavier use of intermediate inputs.

The survey was launched as a pilot in 2017, collecting data for 2016. The ONS judged the 2016 granular data unsuitable for national-accounts use, then improved the questionnaire for the 2017 data collected in 2018. To avoid a discontinuity in the GDP series, the detailed ASGS product patterns are back-cast to 2007. The result is a historical revision rather than a change confined to the latest year.

Services gain weight, but not every service industry is revised up

The most visible effect is a larger measured service economy. Services are now estimated to have accounted for 81.2% of UK gross value added in 2024, compared with 80.4% under the previous estimates. Information and communication, along with administrative and support service activities, made some of the largest contributions to the higher service-sector share.

The revisions do not move every industry in the same direction. For 2024, volume growth in professional, scientific and technical activities has been cut to 0.5% from 2.4%. Wholesale and retail gross value added is now estimated to have fallen 3.6%, compared with a previous estimate of a 0.3% decline. By contrast, financial and insurance activities were revised from a 2.2% contraction to 1.4% growth, making finance the largest positive contributor to the revision in service-sector growth for that year.

Business support services also look stronger over a much longer period. The ONS revised average annual volume growth for that section between 1997 and 2024 upward by 0.4 percentage points. The largest changes were concentrated in office administrative, office support and other business support activities, where the broader product information captured by the ASGS revealed more secondary output.

Information and communication is another case where the level and the growth story move differently. The new methodology raises the estimated size of the sector, but the ONS also made a modest downward revision to its growth over the historical series. One reason is that businesses classified as computer services were found to produce substantial publishing output, particularly licensed computer software. Reallocating that activity changes the measured growth of publishing, computer services and information services even when the underlying economic transactions have not suddenly changed.

The update therefore changes the composition of the economy as much as it changes the headline total. It gives more weight to some service activities, less to some manufacturing and retail activity, and alters how product flows are balanced between producers and users.

Headline growth changes only modestly, but the level is higher

Despite the scale of the methodological overhaul, the revisions to annual real GDP growth are generally small. The ONS now estimates growth of 1.1% in 2024, up from 1.0%, while 2023 growth is revised to 0.4% from 0.3%. Growth in 2022 is trimmed to 5.0% from 5.1%. The largest annual upward revision in the 1997 to 2024 period is 0.3 percentage points in 2017.

The larger change is cumulative. Small upward and downward adjustments across more than two decades leave the level of real GDP in 2024 about 2.5% higher than implied by the previous historical growth path. The 2024 nominal level is now estimated at £2.905 trillion, and the service sector accounts for a bigger share of that economy than previously recorded.

Not all of the Blue Book changes raise GDP. Revised estimates of actual and imputed rents reduce the level of GDP by an average of about 0.3% across 1997 to 2024. The new rental methodology uses more representative rental prices and additional information about housing characteristics. Its impact is larger in earlier years, which means it can still add modestly to measured growth in some later periods even though it lowers the level of GDP.

The services revisions also affect the expenditure side of the national accounts. When the ONS identifies additional products being supplied by businesses, those products must be matched with demand somewhere in the economy. The rebalancing has increased estimates for net trade and gross fixed capital formation in a number of years. For 2023, net trade makes the largest upward contribution to the revision in real GDP growth.

The new history will become part of the official quarterly GDP dataset on 30 September 2026. Monthly GDP will then be aligned with the revised annual and quarterly series in the 15 October release. The ONS has also cautioned that 2024 remains subject to further revision as more complete tax, business-survey and public-sector data become available, so Blue Book 2026 is a major reset of the historical series rather than the final word on every estimate.