Index of Services, UK: April 2025

• Monthly services output was estimated to have fallen for the first time since October 2024, with a decrease of 0.4% in April 2025; this follows an increase in both February and March 2025 of 0.3% and 0.4% respectively.

• There were monthly decreases in 9 of the 14 sectors in April 2025; the largest negative contribution came from "professional, scientific and technical activities" (down 2.4%).

• Below section level, there were two industries that mainly contributed to the monthly fall in April 2025; "legal services" (down 10.2%) and "wholesale trade, except motor vehicles and motor cycles" (down 3.2%).

• The monthly decrease in output was partially offset by monthly increases in 5 of the 14 sectors in April 2025; the largest positive contribution came from "administrative and support service activities" (up 1.6%).

• Services output growth in the three months to April 2025 was estimated to have increased (up 0.6%), when compared to the three months to January 2025.

• In the three months to April 2025, 10 of the 14 sectors showed growth with the main positive contributing sectors being "administrative and support service activities" (up 3.3%), "information and communication" (up 2.4%) and "wholesale and retail activities" (up 1.4%).

All data related to the Index of Services are available on our Related data page.

Response rates for April 2025

The response rates for April 2025 were 72.4% based on forms returned. This accounted for 88.4% of total turnover coverage of the sample population. For further information, see our Current and historical Monthly Business Survey (MBS) (services) response rates dataset.

Data sources and collection

The Index of Services (IoS) is compiled using data from several different sources (share of overall economy based on latest gross value added (GVA) weights). These include the:

• Office for National Statistics (ONS) MBS (34.9%)

• ONS Retail Sales Inquiry (4.8%)

• ONS Government Expenditure (15.3%) 

• ONS Households' Expenditure (11.2%) 

• ONS Finance Expenditure (8.0%) 

• ONS Households and non-profit institutions serving households (1.9%) 

• other (3.6%)

The MBS data are published alongside this release in our MBS turnover of services industries dataset.

Data relating to the retail industry are broadly comparable with our Retail sales, Great Britain: April 2025 bulletin, published on 23 May 2025..

For further information on what is included within "other", please see our Gross domestic product (GDP(o)) data sources catalogue. 

The percentage of each data source is based on their gross value-added weight. Our IoS methods and sources pages provide more information on the data that underpin these statistics; of particular note is our GDP(o) data sources catalogue.

Value Added Tax (VAT) data are also included for small and medium-sized businesses to help inform estimates. For more information, see our VAT turnover data in National Accounts: background and methodology.

Quality and methodology

The data reported in IoS bulletins and datasets are estimates that are subject to uncertainty, for example, sampling variability and non-sampling error. For more information on these, see Section 2 of our Uncertainty and how we measure it for our surveys methodology.

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

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 Services

In line with the National Accounts Revision Policy this release gives data for April 2025, with no previous periods open for revision.

Pausing of Producer Prices publications

Producer prices publications are currently on pause; during work to improve the systems used to create the Producer Price Index (PPI) and the Services Producer Price Indices (SPPI), our quality assurance identified a problem with the chain-linking methods used to calculate the PPI and SPPI indices.

Our investigations so far have concluded the problem affects the period from December 2008 onwards. However, investigations suggest that the main impact on annual producer price inflation rates was in 2022 and 2023, because of the large movements in relative prices during that period.

As these detailed price data are used within IoS calculations, along with gross domestic product (GDP), this may lead to impacts on the level of some industries with revisions to estimates likely in 2022 and 2023. At an aggregate level for GDP, these revisions should be offsetting to an extent, while taken alongside regular data deliveries. Early indications suggest that there will not be a notable change in the recent economic trends seen in these data, but we will update users once more information becomes available. We do not plan any changes to the publication timetable for IoS and will continue to use PPI and SPPI estimates compiled under the current methodology in these publications until updated methods and data are available.

Consumer price inflation

An error has been identified in the Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) data provided to the ONS by the Department for Transport, which is used to calculate consumer prices inflation. This has the effect of overstating the headline Consumer Price Inflation (CPI) and Retail Prices Index (RPI) annual rates by 0.1 percentage points for the year to April 2025 only. This note provides more detail. This error has no impact on IoS estimates for April 2025.

Seasonal adjustment

The monthly estimates of IoS 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.

IoS 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.

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

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

This topic is explored further in our Assessing residual seasonality in published outputs article published 09 May 2025.