Government · UK · Office for National Statistics
UK Disposable Income Spans £16,786 to £84,292 Per Head
ONS figures for 2024 put UK disposable income at £25,965 per head, but the local spread runs from £16,786 in Leicester to £84,292 in Westminster and City of London. For anyone buying media by geography, that is a five-fold gap in what a household can actually spend.
Source published Summarised
Key findings at a glance
- £25,965 UK average gross disposable household income per head in 2024.
- £84,292 Westminster and City of London, the highest local area, over three times the UK average.
- £16,786 Leicester, the lowest local area for disposable income per head.
- £36,487 London, the highest income per head of the twelve UK regions and countries.
- £20,562 The North East, the lowest income per head of the twelve UK regions and countries.
- £1.8tn Total UK gross disposable household income in 2024.
- 7.4% Growth in total UK gross disposable household income between 2023 and 2024.
- 3.1% UK growth in real income per head in 2024 once inflation is stripped out.
- 4.1% Northern Ireland real income growth per head, the strongest in the UK.
- 2.2% The North East real income growth per head, the weakest in the UK.
- £26,911 York and North Yorkshire, the highest earning of the 15 mayoral combined authorities.
- £19,688 The West Midlands, the lowest earning of the 15 mayoral combined authorities.
What the report covers
Gross disposable household income (GDHI) is the money households have left to spend or save once tax and social contributions are taken off. The ONS publishes it annually for every tier of UK geography, and the 2026 release covers 1997 to 2024, with 2024 estimates marked provisional.
The headline is the size of the gap rather than the direction of travel. UK GDHI rose 7.4% in 2024 to nearly £1.8 trillion, and every country and region grew. But only three of the twelve regions sat above the UK average of £25,965 per head: London (£36,487), the South East (£29,577) and the East of England (£26,795). At local level the range widens sharply, from £84,292 in Westminster and City of London to £16,786 in Leicester. Even inside London the spread runs from £84,292 down to £24,489 in Barking and Dagenham and Havering, so region-level averages hide most of what matters.
This release also introduces something new: experimental estimates of regional real household disposable income (RHDI), which adjust for inflation using regionally weighted price deflators. That matters because nominal growth of 7% flatters the picture. In real terms UK income per head grew 3.1%, and the range between Northern Ireland (4.1%) and the North East (2.2%) is far narrower than the nominal figures suggest. Read it alongside our earlier report on how much UK households actually spend each week, which covers the outgoings side of the same balance sheet.
What this means for UK marketers
The practical use of this data is geographic budget allocation. Most UK accounts we see run national campaigns with either no location bid adjustments at all, or adjustments set once and never revisited. A five-fold difference in disposable income per head between the top and bottom local areas is a strong argument for treating geography as a real targeting variable rather than a reporting dimension.
Three things follow. First, if you sell a considered purchase or a premium product, the ITL3 breakdown is a better starting point for location bid adjustments in Google Ads than the broad region. Targeting "London" treats Westminster and Barking and Dagenham as the same audience when their disposable income differs by more than three times. Second, if your product is price-sensitive, the low-income areas are not automatically bad territory, they are territory where the offer, the payment terms and the messaging need to change. Volume is often there, margin expectations should not be.
Third, be careful about reading nominal growth as recovered spending power. GDHI grew 7.4% in cash terms but only 3.1% per head in real terms, and consumer caution has not lifted in line with the headline: our report on Britons still cutting back on non-essentials found the majority still trimming discretionary spend. Budgeting on the nominal number will overstate what the market can absorb.
For B2B and recruitment advertisers the combined authority table is the more useful cut, because it maps onto how devolved economic policy and local investment are now organised. York and North Yorkshire at £26,911 and the West Midlands at £19,688 are not just different markets, they are different cost bases for salary benchmarking and different competitive environments for local search. If geography is currently a flat layer in your account, this dataset is the cheapest available evidence for restructuring it, and it is the sort of segmentation work our digital marketing team builds into media plans as standard.
How they got the data
GDHI is produced by the ONS as part of the UK regional accounts and is consistent with the UK National Accounts. Estimates are built from the income components flowing into and out of the household sector, then allocated across the International Territorial Level geography framework at ITL1 (countries and regions), ITL2 (subregions, realigned in 2025 to match mayoral combined authorities) and ITL3 (local areas). The 2024 figures are provisional and will be revised.
The statistics carry the ONS label "official statistics in development", and accreditation was removed from ONS outputs drawing on the Labour Force Survey and Annual Population Survey. APS data feed some GDHI components but are one input among several, so the ONS does not expect them to materially shift the regional distribution. The new real income measure is deflated using national price deflators reweighted by regional household final consumption expenditure data, so that regional differences in spending patterns are reflected rather than a single UK-wide deflator being applied everywhere.
Government · UK
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From Office for National Statistics · published 19/08/2026