Index of Production, UK: February 2026

• Production output was estimated to have increased by 1.2% during the three months to February 2026, compared with the three months to November 2025.

• There were positive contributions from "manufacturing" (up 1.2%), "electricity and gas" (up 3.6%), and "water supply and sewerage" (up 0.1%) in the three months to February 2026; these were partially offset by a fall from "mining and quarrying" (down 2.1%).

• Only 5 of the 13 subsectors in "manufacturing" increased during the three months to February 2026, with the largest positive contribution from "transport equipment'' (up 8.9%), which contributed 0.74 percentage points to the 1.2% manufacturing rise; within the transport equipment subsector, "motor vehicles, trailers and semi-trailers" increased by 18.8%, as the industry continued to recover from a cyber incident at a major car manufacturer in September 2025.

• Monthly production output was estimated to have increased by 0.5% in February 2026, which follows successive falls in January 2026 (down 0.1%) and December 2025 (down 0.4%); the rise in the three months to February 2026 is largely because of the large monthly fall in September 2025 (down 1.8%)

• The rise in monthly production output in February 2026 was because of strength in "mining and quarrying" (up 3.9%), "electricity and gas" (up 1.5%), and partially from "water supply and sewerage" (up 0.2%); these were minimally offset by "manufacturing" (down 0.1%).

• The rise in "mining and quarrying" (up 3.9%) was caused mainly by "extraction of crude petroleum and natural gas" (up 5.1%).

• 6 of the 13 manufacturing subsectors saw decreased output, with the largest negative contributions coming from "transport equipment" (down 2.1%), "basic metals and metal products" (down 2.1%), and "food products" (down 1.2%); the largest positive contributions came from "machinery and equipment" (up 3.9%), "electrical equipment" (up 6.3%), and "computer, electronic and optical products" (up 1.6%).

All data related to the Index of Production (IoP) are available on our Related data page.

The Index of Production (IoP) uses data from a variety of sources. It is calculated by taking turnover and removing the effect of price changes, or by using direct volume estimates.

Most of these data are collected as "turnover values" through the Monthly Business Survey (MBS). Direct volume series are also collected by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), and the International Steel Statistics Bureau (ISSB) for steel industries.

The MBS is fully online. Business owners can log in from any location and submit their data at an appropriate time.

Value Added Tax (VAT) data have also been included for 64 production industries for small- and medium-sized businesses from January 2018. More information is available in our VAT turnover data in National Accounts: background and methodology. A comprehensive list of the IoP source data can be found in our Gross domestic product (GDP) data sources catalogue.

Response rates for February 2026 

MBS response rates were 77.6% for February 2026, based on forms returned. This accounted for 90.4% of total turnover coverage of the sample population. For further information, see our Monthly Business Survey (production) response rates dataset.

Quality and methodology

The data reported in IoP bulletins and datasets are estimates that are subject to uncertainty, such as sampling variability and non-sampling error. More information is available in Section 2 of our Uncertainty and how we measure it for our surveys web page.

More quality and methodology information (QMI) on strengths, limitations, appropriate uses, and how the data were created is available in our Index of Production, UK QMI.

Accredited official statistics

These accredited official statistics were independently reviewed by the Office for Statistics Regulation in April 2014. They comply with the standards of trustworthiness, quality, and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics, and should be labelled "accredited official statistics".

Revisions to Index of Production

This release gives data for February 2026 for the first time. We have been open to revisions from January 2024. This includes the revisions published in our GDP quarterly national accounts, UK: October to December 2025, and further revisions because of improved seasonal adjustment and data sources.

We will open for revision back to January 2024 in our next IoP publication, publishing on 14 May 2026. For further details, please see our National Accounts Revisions Policy: updated January 2026.

Seasonal adjustment

The monthly estimates of IoP are seasonally adjusted. Seasonal adjustment is the process of removing the variations associated with the time of year, or the arrangement of the calendar, from a data time series.

IoP estimates, as for many data time series, are difficult to analyse using raw data because seasonal effects dominate short-term movements. Identifying and removing the seasonal component leaves the trend and irregular components.

We use the X-13-ARIMA-SEATS approach to seasonal adjustment. Seasonal adjustment parameters are monitored closely and are regularly reviewed. For more information, please see our Seasonal adjustment methodology.

In our IoP estimates, seasonal adjustment is applied at the industry level. The seasonally adjusted series are aggregated to create estimates by sector and total IoP output. 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 the indirectly derived aggregate time series.

This topic is explored further in our Assessing residual seasonality in published outputs methodology, updated on 30 September 2025.

Based on our quality assurance as part of this publication, there is no statistically significant residual seasonality in our aggregate estimates for the IoP in the period from January 1997 to February 2026.