Construction output in Great Britain (2024)

• Monthly construction output is estimated to have decreased by 1.4% in volume terms in April 2024, with the monthly value in level terms at £14,940 million.

• The fall in monthly output came from decreases in both new work (1.9% fall), and repair and maintenance (0.8% fall); anecdotal evidence from survey returns suggests effects of heavy rainfall and strong winds affected output in April.

• At the sector level, seven out of the nine sectors saw a fall in April 2024; the main contributors to the monthly decrease were private housing new work, and private housing repair and maintenance, which fell by 4.4% and 2.5%, respectively.

• Construction output is estimated to have decreased by 2.2% in the three months to April 2024; this came from decreases in both new work (2.8% fall), and repair and maintenance (1.4% fall) and is the sixth consecutive fall in the three-monthly series.

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 2024) 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

Reasons for revisions to construction output in this release

There are no revisions to previously published construction output estimates in this release, and April 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). For further information on the revisions profile, see ourOutput in the construction industry revisions triangle (one-month growth) dataset and ourOutput 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 April 2024 showed improvement compared with levels in recent years since the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The survey turnover response rate for April 2024 was 75.7% We have continued not to apply a bias adjustment since May 2020, while we review this approach going forward. 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 frameworkto improve how we produce volume estimates of 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.