Business investment in the UK: January to March 2025 provisional results

• UK business investment increased by 5.9% in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025 and is 8.1% above the level in the same quarter a year ago.

• This release contains datasets for the Quarter 1 2025 business investment provisional results; for further commentary on these data please see our Gross domestic product (GDP) first quarterly estimate bulletin, linked in Section 4.

Quality and methodology information (QMI) on strengths, limitations, appropriate uses, and how the data were created is available in our Business investment QMI.

Revisions

In line with our National Accounts Revisions Policy, there are no periods open for revision in this publication.

Data in this bulletin

All data in this bulletin, unless specified, are presented in chained volume measure (CVM), otherwise known as "real" measure. This means the effect of price changes is removed from the data (in other words, the data are deflated).

In Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025, the Quarterly Acquisitions and Disposals of Capital Assets Survey (QCAS), the largest data source for gross fixed capital formation (GFCF) and business investment, had a response rate of 64.7% for estimates used in the provisional release.

Adjustments

Large capital expenditure tends to be reported later in the data collection period than smaller capital expenditure. This means that larger expenditures are often included in the revised (Month 3) results but are not reported in time for the provisional (Month 2) results. This can result in upward revisions in the later estimates for business investment and GFCF. Following investigation of the impact of this effect, from Quarter 3 (July to Sept) 2013, an option to include a bias adjustment was introduced in the provisional estimate to help manage uncertainty around these early estimates.

This adjustment approach was suspended in Quarter 3 2020 because of uncertainties surrounding the effect of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. However, the option to include a bias adjustment was reintroduced to business investment and GFCF, after further investigation and analysis of its impact since Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2021. The bias adjustment for this provisional release is £1.6 billion.

Accredited official statistics

These accredited official statistics were independently reviewed by the Office for Statistics Regulation in September 2013. They comply with the standards of trustworthiness, quality and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics and should be labelled "accredited official statistics".