Government · UK · Office for National Statistics
UK Households Spend £676.60 a Week as Income Gap Widens
The ONS Family Spending release shows the average UK household spent £676.60 a week in the year to March 2025, a 5% rise in real terms. The gap between the richest and poorest fifth widened to 2.7 times, the largest jump since the pandemic.
Source published Summarised
Key findings at a glance
- £676.60 average weekly UK household spend in the year to March 2025
- 5% real-terms rise in weekly household spend year on year
- 10% amount by which weekly spend still sits below its pre-pandemic FYE 2020 level
- 18% of the weekly budget goes on housing, fuel and power, the single largest share
- 14% of weekly spend goes on transport, the second largest category
- 2.7 times more the richest fifth of households spend than the poorest fifth
- £1,083.60 average weekly spend of the richest fifth of households
- £407.30 average weekly spend of the poorest fifth of households
- 14% real-terms rise in spending on package holidays abroad
- 25% nominal rise in spending on second-hand cars
- 9% real-terms rise in recreation and culture spending
- 9.8% rise in the national minimum wage during the year
What the report covers
Family Spending in the UK is the ONS annual picture of what households actually spend, broken down by income, age, economic status, household type and region. This release covers the financial year ending March 2025, so April 2024 to March 2025, and is drawn from the long-running Living Costs and Food Survey.
The headline is that the average UK household spent £676.60 a week, a real-terms rise of 5% once inflation is stripped out. Spending grew across most categories, yet the total still sits about 10% below where it was before the pandemic. The more useful detail for anyone planning marketing budgets sits underneath the average: the gap between the highest and lowest earners widened sharply, a pattern that builds on our earlier report on the ONS cost-of-living findings.
What this means for UK marketers
The temptation with a release like this is to read the average and move on. That would be a mistake, because the story is the spread, not the midpoint. The richest fifth of households now spend £1,083.60 a week, against £407.30 for the poorest fifth, a ratio of 2.7 to 1 and the widest gap since the pandemic. The two groups are also spending more for opposite reasons.
Higher-income households are trading up. Since the 2023 inflation peak they have put markedly more into second-hand cars, transport, package holidays abroad, recreation and clothing, which points to real discretionary confidence. Lower-income households are spending more largely because rent, food and energy cost more, not because they are buying more or better. For marketers that distinction is everything. Discretionary demand, the travel, leisure, dining and big-ticket categories where margins and basket sizes are healthiest, is concentrating at the top of the income distribution.
The practical response is to stop addressing "the UK consumer" as a single audience. Premium and experience-led propositions have room to push on quality, range and aspiration for higher-income segments. Value and essentials brands need messaging built around trust, predictability and stretch, because their customers are absorbing forced cost rises with little slack. This is a segmentation and targeting problem before it is a creative one, and it is where our digital marketing services focus first: matching the offer, the channel and the message to where spending power actually sits. The same divergence showed up in spending velocity in our earlier report on UK card spending, so this is a trend to plan around, not a one-off.
How they got the data
The figures come from the ONS Living Costs and Food Survey, a continuous voluntary survey of UK households in which participants record what they spend. This release covers the financial year ending March 2025. Expenditure is grouped using the international COICOP classification, and year-on-year changes are shown in real terms, adjusted for inflation using the Consumer Prices Index specific to each category rather than headline CPI. Households are ranked into income fifths using OECD-equivalised disposable income.
The ONS notes that sample sizes, while larger than the previous year, remain small, so lower-level category estimates carry more uncertainty and no formal significance testing has been applied at this stage. Background on the survey itself is set out in the ONS Living Costs and Food Survey documentation.
Government · UK
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From Office for National Statistics · published 11/06/2026