Government · UK · Office for National Statistics
39% of UK Exporters Report Higher Costs Than a Year Ago
39% of UK exporters say their exporting costs are higher than a year ago, the highest share the ONS has recorded since June 2023. The supply chain and energy concerns that spiked over the winter have not come back down.
Source published Summarised
Key findings at a glance
- 39% of UK exporters reported higher exporting costs in June 2026 than a year earlier, the highest share since June 2023
- 9pp increase in that share of exporters since December 2025
- 23% of trading businesses with 10 or more employees had exported goods, services or both in the previous 12 months
- 29% of businesses with 10 or more employees were concerned about international conflict affecting their supply chains over the next year
- 19pp rise in that supply chain conflict concern since December 2025
- 20% of businesses with 10 or more employees were concerned about the impact of shipping disruption
- 12pp rise in shipping disruption concern since December 2025
- 52% of businesses reporting supply chain concerns expected the cost of sourcing materials to be affected
- 47% of the same group expected their transportation costs to be affected
- 14pp rise in that transportation cost expectation since December 2025
- 57% of all businesses expressed some degree of concern about energy prices in late July 2026
- 70% of businesses with 10 or more employees were concerned about energy prices, well above the all-business figure
What the report covers
The Office for National Statistics published the latest Business Insights and Conditions Survey (BICS) results on 6 August 2026. This is Wave 161 of a voluntary fortnightly survey of UK private sector businesses, live from 20 July to 2 August 2026. The ONS sampled 38,618 businesses and received 10,034 responses, a rate of 26.0%. Questions in this wave covered exporting and importing, rules of origin, UKCA markings, supply chains, domestic trade, and international trade including EU trade, US trade and US tariffs.
Read fortnight to fortnight, almost nothing moved. The ONS describes most of the cost concern measures as broadly stable against June and early July. The story sits in the seven-month comparison. Concern about international conflict disrupting supply chains is at 29% among businesses with 10 or more employees, 19 points higher than in December 2025. Concern about shipping disruption is at 20%, up 12 points over the same period. Among businesses that reported supply chain concerns, 52% expect the cost of sourcing materials to be affected and 47% expect transportation costs to be affected, the latter up 14 points since December.
Exporting is where the pressure shows up most clearly. In late June 2026, 23% of trading businesses with 10 or more employees had exported goods, services or both in the previous 12 months. Of those exporters, 39% reported that their exporting costs had risen compared with June 2025, a 9 point increase on December 2025 and the highest reading since June 2023, when it stood at 43%. Energy and fuel worry remains broad rather than acute: 57% of all businesses reported some degree of concern about energy prices and 60% about fuel prices, rising to 70% on both measures among businesses with 10 or more employees. All of this lands on a UK business population that is already barely growing.
What this means for UK marketers
None of this reads as a marketing story on its face. It becomes one the moment you follow where marketing money actually comes from. Input costs, transport and exporting are all pushing in the same direction, and the businesses feeling it hardest are the larger ones: 70% of firms with 10 or more employees report energy price concern against 57% across the whole population. When gross margin tightens, the acquisition budget is usually the first line item to get a hard look, and the agency retainer attached to it is the second.
For UK ecommerce and B2B operators, the useful response is to stop trying to solve a margin problem with more traffic. If the cost of getting a product to a customer is rising, buying more clicks at the same conversion rate just moves more units at a worse margin. The cheaper lever is conversion rate optimisation, earning more revenue from traffic you are already paying for. Moving conversion from 1.8% to 2.2% does more for contribution margin than a 20% budget increase, and it does not compound the cost problem.
Exporters have a second, narrower job. If 39% are absorbing higher costs, some of that gets passed on, and how it is communicated matters. Delivery surcharges and revised pricing that only appear at checkout are a well-established driver of basket abandonment. Publishing landed cost, duty and delivery expectations on the product page instead is a trust decision as much as a UX one, and it is a good deal cheaper than winning the same customer twice.
There is a targeting angle as well. Businesses with 10 or more employees are consistently more worried than the average on every measure in this wave. If you sell operational tooling, logistics, sourcing or finance services into UK companies, that cohort is primed for a cost-reduction message in a way the general market is not. Set it against the wider price picture, where headline inflation has eased while services inflation has stayed sticky, and the positioning writes itself: consumer prices are calming down, business input costs are not.
How they got the data
BICS is a voluntary fortnightly survey of UK private sector businesses run by the ONS. Wave 161 was live from 20 July to 2 August 2026, drawn from a sample of 38,618 businesses, of which 10,034 responded, a response rate of 26.0%. Results are weighted estimates rather than raw counts, and the ONS publishes confidence intervals alongside the main dataset. The sampling frame follows the Monthly Business Survey, covering the UK for production industries and Great Britain for construction, retail and services.
Several sectors sit outside that frame, including agriculture, oil and gas extraction, energy generation and supply, public administration and defence, publicly provided education and health, and finance and insurance. The public sector is not sampled at all, so these figures describe private sector trading conditions only. The ONS classifies BICS as official statistics in development and advises caution when using the data: questions are added, removed and amended between waves to track changing conditions, which limits how far back any single measure can be compared. Full detail is set out in the ONS quality and methodology information for the survey.
Government · UK
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From Office for National Statistics · published 06/08/2026