# Where every pound goes: UK public spending

What the UK government spends its money on, and how that has changed over more than seventy years. Total Managed Expenditure, the broadest measure of everything the public sector spends, reached about £1,360.1bn in the 2025 to 2026 financial year, 44.3 per cent of GDP, up from 34.9 per cent of GDP in 2000 to 2001. This page shows where that money goes by function and by government department, and how spending as a share of the economy has moved since 1950.

Source page: https://britishresilienceindex.com/deep-dive/public-spending
Machine readable data: https://britishresilienceindex.com/data/deep-dive/public-spending.json

## How to read this

Three different framings of public spending are used here, and they are not directly comparable pound for pound. The headline and long view figures are Total Managed Expenditure (TME), the National Accounts measure of everything the public sector spends, from the PESA Chapter 4 trends tables and the OBR public finances databank. The where it goes figures are TME broken down by COFOG function (health, education, defence and the rest), from PESA Chapter 5, and sum to the same TME total. The department figures are Departmental Expenditure Limits (DEL), the budgets set for individual departments in spending plans, from PESA Chapter 1. DEL is a narrower concept than TME: it excludes most social security and debt interest, which are Annually Managed Expenditure and are not set as fixed budgets in the same way, so departmental DEL totals do not sum to TME.

## £1,360.1bn, 44.3 per cent of GDP

Total Managed Expenditure, the broadest measure of what the UK public sector spends, reached about £1,360.1bn in the financial year 2025 to 2026, 44.3 per cent of the size of the economy. That share has moved a long way over time: it was 34.9 per cent of GDP in 2000 to 2001, a decade below where it stands today. The rest of this page sets out where that spending goes, by government function and by department, and how the share of the economy it represents has moved decade by decade since 1950.

- **Total spending bn**: 1,360.1
- **Gdp share pct**: 44.3
- **Compare year**: 2000-01
- **Compare pct**: 34.9

## Social protection and health are more than half of everything spent

Splitting spending by government function rather than by department shows what the money actually buys. Social protection, mostly pensions and working age benefits, is the largest single function at £407.3bn, 29.9 per cent of the total. Health follows some way behind, then general public services, which includes the interest paid on government debt, then education and defence.

| name | valueBn | pctOfTme | ofWhichDebtInterestBn |
|---|---|---|---|
| Social protection | 407.3 | 29.9 | - |
| Health | 257.5 | 18.9 | - |
| General public services | 165.5 | 12.2 | 130.3 |
| Education | 125.7 | 9.2 | - |
| Economic affairs | 94 | 6.9 | - |
| Defence | 65.4 | 4.8 | - |
| Public order and safety | 55.7 | 4.1 | - |
| Housing and community amenities | 22.5 | 1.7 | - |
| Environment protection | 19.2 | 1.4 | - |
| Recreation, culture and religion | 15.1 | 1.1 | - |

## The largest departmental budgets

Departmental Expenditure Limits (DEL) are the fixed budgets set for each department in spending plans, here for 2026-27. Health and Social Care has by far the largest budget at £226.2bn, more than double Education, the next largest. DEL excludes most social security and debt interest, which are demand led rather than fixed budgets, so this table is not the same shape as the where it goes function breakdown above.

| name | valueBn |
|---|---|
| Health and Social Care | 226.2 |
| Education | 102.4 |
| Defence | 65.1 |
| Scottish Government (2) | 50.5 |
| Transport | 30.2 |
| Welsh Government (3) | 22.6 |
| Home Office | 22.1 |
| Northern Ireland Executive | 19.1 |
| MHCLG - Local Government | 18.4 |
| Science, Innovation and Technology | 16.1 |
| Justice | 15.1 |
| Work and Pensions | 14.9 |

## Spending has been on an upward path for seventy five years

Total Managed Expenditure as a share of GDP has risen and fallen with wars, recessions and deliberate policy choices, but the broad path since 1950 has been upward. It stood at 39.2 per cent of GDP in 1950 to 1951, fell through the second half of the twentieth century to a low of about 34.8 per cent around 1990-91, and reached 44.3 per cent in 2025 to 2026, close to the peak of 52.3 per cent reached around 2020-21 during the pandemic.

**Series**

| year | startYear | pct |
|---|---|---|
| 1950-51 | 1,950 | 39.2 |
| 1960-61 | 1,960 | 35.9 |
| 1970-71 | 1,970 | 39.5 |
| 1980-81 | 1,980 | 42.8 |
| 1990-91 | 1,990 | 34.8 |
| 2000-01 | 2,000 | 34.9 |
| 2010-11 | 2,010 | 45.5 |
| 2020-21 | 2,020 | 52.3 |
| 2023-24 | 2,023 | 44.1 |
| 2024-25 | 2,024 | 44 |
| 2025-26 | 2,025 | 44.3 |

- **Start year**: 1950-51
- **Start pct**: 39.2
- **End year**: 2025-26
- **End pct**: 44.3
- **Low year**: 1990-91
- **Low pct**: 34.8
- **High year**: 2020-21
- **High pct**: 52.3

## Where the money comes from

- **Text**: This page shows where public money goes. The companion tax burden deep-dive on this site shows where it comes from: which taxes raise the most, how the overall tax take has moved since the late 1940s, and how it compares with this page's spending totals.
- **Link slug**: tax-burden
- **Link label**: UK tax burden: where the money comes from

## For public spending

- Social protection and health together are more than half of all spending, and both are largely demand led rather than fixed budgets. How much room does that leave for changing the shape of spending in the shorter term?
- Gross debt interest alone is close to the entire education budget. How much would a change in interest rates or in the level of debt itself alter the room available for everything else?
- Spending as a share of GDP is close to its post pandemic peak, having spent most of the last fifteen years above the level seen through the 1990s and 2000s. Is that a temporary plateau or a new baseline?
- The tax burden deep-dive on this site shows tax receipts also close to their highest share of the economy since the early 1950s. With spending and tax both elevated at the same time, what does that combination mean for the gap between them, covered in the national debt deep-dive?

## Sources

- Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses (PESA) 2026 (https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/public-expenditure-statistical-analyses-2026) · Open Government Licence v3.0
- Public finances databank, July 2026, Office for Budget Responsibility (https://obr.uk/data/) · Open Government Licence v3.0
- Main Supply Estimates 2026 to 2027, HM Treasury (HC 1855) (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/main-supply-estimates-2026-to-2027) · Open Government Licence v3.0

## Caveats and data notes

- Three different framings of public spending appear on this page and they are not directly interchangeable. Total Managed Expenditure (TME) is the National Accounts measure of everything the public sector spends. The where it goes figures split that same TME total by COFOG function. Departmental budgets (DEL) are a narrower concept covering only the fixed budgets set for departments, excluding most social security and debt interest, so department figures do not sum to TME and should not be added to the function figures.
- General public services, as classified by COFOG, includes gross public sector debt interest of about £130.3bn in 2025-26. (2) Debt interest figures include Bank of England public debt transactions in respect of the Asset Purchase Facility and Special Liquidity Scheme. This is a gross figure, not netted against interest income the public sector receives on its own asset holdings; a net of income figure is sometimes quoted elsewhere but could not be independently verified from the files used to build this page, so it is not shown here.
- PESA, the Estimates and the National Accounts are three separate publisher frameworks with different scopes and timing, and moving between them leaves reconciliation wedges rather than exact matches. As one example: PESA Table 1.9's own Total DEL plans figure for 2026-27 is £665.0bn, while the separately published Main Estimates 2026-27 document states a whole of government DEL total of £655.3bn, a gap of about £9.7bn. The gap is not an error in either document; it is the unallocated Reserve and other central adjustments that PESA's forward plans include and that Main Estimates, a Supply document published during the financial year, has not yet allocated to departments.
- Devolved administration figures (Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland) are block grant totals set through the Barnett formula, not a breakdown of how each administration allocates that money once received.
- All PESA figures are for United Kingdom financial years (April to March). The long view series uses the OBR's historical outturn series back to 1950 to 1951; figures before PESA's own published range are national accounts estimates rather than PESA outturn data.
- Every total reconciles to the publisher's own table totals, cross checked between PESA Chapters 1, 4 and 5, the Main Estimates DEL tables and the OBR databank; see the build script's reconciliation log for details.

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British Resilience Index, a non-partisan UK civic data project. Every figure is
reconciled to its primary official publisher before it is shown. Free to cite with
attribution: https://britishresilienceindex.com