Retail sales, Great Britain: May 2025

Retail sales volumes (quantity bought) are estimated to have fallen by 2.7% in May 2025, following a rise of 1.3% in April 2025 (revised up from a rise of 1.2% in our last bulletin).

Food store sales volumes fell back in May. This followed a strong rise in April which retailers attributed to the good weather.

Despite this fall on the month, sales volumes rose by 0.8% in the three months to May 2025 when compared with the three months to February 2025.

Sales volumes fell by 2.7% during May 2025, following a 1.3% rise in April. This was the largest fall on the month since December 2023. Sales volumes fell by 1.3% over the year to May 2025.

Volumes were down by 2.7%, compared with their pre-coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic level in February 2020, reaching their lowest level since December 2024.

More broadly, there was a 0.8% rise across the three months to May 2025 when compared with the three months to February 2025, and a 1.7% rise when comparing with the three months to May 2024. These data are available in our Retail Sales Index datasets.

Food stores sales volumes fell by 5.0% in May 2025 following growth of 4.7% in April. This was their largest monthly fall since May 2021. The fall was mainly because of reduced sales volumes in supermarkets, with retailer comments talking of inflation and customer cutbacks, alongside reduced sales of alcohol and tobacco products.

Non-food stores sales volumes - the total of department, clothing, household and other non-food stores - fell by 1.4% over the month, mainly because of falls in clothing and household goods stores such as hardware, paints and glass retailers. Retailer comments mentioned reduced footfall and consumers having completed home projects earlier than usual this year because of good weather, leading to lower sales in May.

The amount spent online, known as "online spending values", fell by 1.0% over the month to May 2025 and by 2.5% when comparing May 2025 with May 2024. More broadly, sales values rose by 3.6% when comparing the three months to May 2025 with the three months to February 2025.

Total spend - the sum of in-store and online sales - fell by 2.4% over the month. As a result, the proportion of sales made online rose from 26.8% in April 2025 to 27.2% in May 2025.

For May 2025, the Retail Sales Index (RSI) response rates were 60.3% based on returned forms, 0.4 percentage points above the initial estimate for April 2025. This accounted for 95.3% of total turnover coverage of the sample population. For historical response information, see our Retail sales quality tables dataset.

Information on how we calculated the data, including strengths and limitations, and a glossary of relevant terms, is available in our RSI Quality and Methodology Information (QMI).

Seasonal adjustment

Seasonally adjusted estimates are derived by estimating and removing calendar effects (for example, Easter moving between March and April) and seasonal effects (for example, increased spending in December as a result of Christmas) from the non-seasonally adjusted estimates.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) uses the X-13ARIMA-SEATS approach to seasonal adjustment. Seasonal adjustment parameters are monitored closely and regularly reviewed. For more information, please see our seasonal adjustment methodology page.

Seasonal adjustment is applied at the industry level and the seasonally adjusted series are aggregated to create estimates by industry sector and total retail. As part of our quality assurance approach, residual seasonality checks are regularly completed by our time series analysis team on both the directly seasonally adjusted series, and also the indirectly derived aggregate time series.

Accredited official statistics

These accredited official statistics were independently reviewed by the Office for Statistics Regulation in May 2015. They comply with the standards of trustworthiness, quality and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics and should be labelled "accredited official statistics".