Construction output in Great Britain: January 2024

• Construction output is estimated to have decreased 0.9% in the three months to January 2024; this came solely from a decrease in new work (4.5% fall), as repair and maintenance increased by 4.0%.

• The decrease over the three months came from infrastructure new work and private housing new work, which fell 9.3% and 5.2%, respectively; with the main positive contributions coming from non-housing repair and maintenance, and private housing repair and maintenance, which increased 3.2% and 3.3%, respectively.

• Monthly construction output is estimated to have increased 1.1% in volume terms in January 2024; this follows three consecutive monthly falls, with the monthly value in levels terms at £15,422 million in January 2024.

• The increase in monthly output came from increases in both new work (1.1%) and repair and maintenance (1.2%). 

• At the sector level, six out of the nine sectors saw a rise in January 2024; the main contributors to the monthly increase were private new housing, and non-housing repair and maintenance, which increased 2.6% and 1.9%, respectively.

Construction output estimates

Construction output estimates are monthly estimates of the amount of output chargeable to customers for building and civil engineering work done in the relevant period, excluding Value Added Tax (VAT) and payments to subcontractors.

Seasonally adjusted estimates

Seasonally adjusted estimates are derived by estimating and removing calendar effects (for example, leap years such as 2020) and seasonal effects (for example, decreased activity at Christmas because of site shutdowns) from the non-seasonally adjusted estimates.

Value estimates

The value estimates reflect the total value of work that businesses have completed over a reference month.

Volume estimates

The volume estimates are calculated by taking the value estimates and adjusting to remove the impact of price changes.

Quality and methodology

More quality and methodology information (QMI) is available in:

• our Construction output QMI

• our Construction output price indices (OPIs) QMI

• our New orders in construction QMI

The data reported in construction output bulletins and datasets are estimates that are subject to uncertainty, for example sampling variability and non-sampling error.

Reasons for revisions to construction output in this release

There are no revisions to previously published construction output estimates in this release, and January 2024 is being produced for the first time. This is consistent with the National Accounts Revisions Policy.

It is important to note that early estimates are subject to revision (positive and negative) and for further information on the revisions profile, see our Output in the construction industry revisions triangle one-month growth dataset and our Output in the construction industry revisions triangle three-month growth dataset.

Sub-national and sub-sector construction output

Data on new orders supplied by Barbour ABI are used to model the breakdown of the overall output figures for Great Britain into the lower level and regional data. This is shown in Tables 1 and 2 of our Output in the construction Industry: sub-national and sub-sector dataset. More detail is available in our Quality assurance of administrative data used in construction statistics methodology.

Bias adjustment

Typically, since the move to monthly gross domestic product (GDP) estimates, an adjustment to address any bias in survey responses for construction output is applied to the early construction output monthly estimates. We show this in our Improvements to construction statistics: Addressing the bias in early estimates of construction output, June 2018 article.

Response rates for January 2024 showed improvement compared with levels in recent years since the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The survey turnover response rate for January 2024 was 75.0%. We have continued not to apply a bias adjustment for January 2024 while we review this approach in the future. More information on our response rates is available in our Output in the construction industry dataset.

Differences with monthly GDP construction estimates

In Blue Book 2021, we introduced a new framework to improve how we produce volume estimates of gross domestic product (GDP) for balanced years as part of the supply use process. This was explained in our Producing an alternative approach to GDP using experimental double deflation estimates article. This framework included the implementation of double-deflated industry-level gross value added (GVA) for the first time. This improvement was reflected in the GDP quarterly national accounts, UK: April to June 2021 bulletin and datasetand GDP monthly estimate, UK: August 2021 bulletin for the first time.

As a result, volume estimates in the monthly GDP and construction outputs releases will differ for the period 1997 to 2020. This is because the construction publication measures the volume of construction work (output), while the GDP series measures GVA (that is, output minus intermediate consumption). Construction estimates will align, but on a growth basis from January 2021 onwards.

Information and indicative effects of this change to industry-level GVA volume can be found in our Impact of double deflation on industry chain volume measure annual estimates article and our Impact of Blue Book 2021 changes on quarterly volume estimates of gross domestic product by industry article.

Publishing content review

This release is a headline-only bulletin. We are currently reviewing the content we publish and are trialling a system of a full bulletin release on quarter months, with headline-only releases on the other two months of each quarter. There will be no change to the accompanying data and we will continue to publish all our usual datasets every month. We will announce a decision in a future release and welcome any feedback at construction.statistics@ons.gov.uk.