£676.60 a week: where a British household’s money actually goes

The statistics office measures how much a British household spends in a week and on what. The figures for the financial year from April 2024 to March 2025 give a benchmark worth checking your own budget against.

The headline figure

The average household spent £676.60 a week. That is £53.30 more than the year before, a rise of 9%. Adjusted for inflation the increase is more modest: £35.10, or 5%.

Converted to a month, that is about £2,930 per household.

And one caveat that is easy to miss: despite the increase, spending is still £75.60 a week lower than in the financial year ending 2020. Households have not returned to their pre-pandemic level.

Where the money goes

The largest category is housing, fuel and power: £118.40 a week, or 18% of all spending, up £5.60 over the year.

Second is transport: £96.40, or 14%. And transport produced the biggest increase of the year — up £8.10, or 9%.

A caveat from the office itself is needed here, or the housing share misleads. Mortgage interest payments and Council Tax are not in that category — they sit under "other expenditure items". So housing's real share of the budget is higher than 18%.

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Food and non-alcoholic drinks rose by £3.20, but almost all of that is price: in real terms the increase is only £1.60, or 2%.

What rose fastest

Net rent rose by £7.00 a week — 14% in nominal terms, but only 6% after inflation.

Mortgage interest added £3.80, also 14%. The office attributes this to households continuing to move off lower fixed-rate deals.

Energy did something curious. In cash terms spending fell by £4.60, down 11% — Ofgem's price cap came down over the period. But in real terms it rose by £2.20, or 7%.

Second-hand cars are a story of their own: up £5.50 a week, a real-terms rise of 25%.

What people chose to spend more on

Package holidays abroad: up £5.80 nominally, 21%, and £4.10 after inflation.

Sport — admissions, subscriptions, classes and equipment hire — rose 29% and 35% across different lines. Restaurants and cafés, 9% and 13%.

The office's conclusion reads almost sympathetically: households face unavoidable price rises, but where they can, they are spending more on personal transport and leisure.

The gap between rich and poor widened

The richest fifth of households spent £1,083.60 a week, the poorest fifth £407.30. A gap of 2.7 times against 2.5 a year earlier, the largest widening since 2021.

The cause is speed: the richest increased spending by £98.10 (10%), the poorest by £18.10 (5%). Half the rate.

Work it out: the difference between the top and bottom fifth is £676.30 a week. That is, to within thirty pence, the entire weekly budget of an average household.

The office also notes the different nature of the spending. Since the inflation peak, the poorest increased real spending on rent, food and energy. The richest, on second-hand cars and holidays abroad.

The backdrop

Over the same period the national minimum wage rose 9.8%, from £10.42 to £11.44 an hour. Median weekly earnings were up 4.7%.

Inflation over the 12 months to March 2025 was 2.6%. So earnings outpaced prices. But the spread within the basket is wide: housing, fuel and power came in at 5.5%, double the headline rate.

One more thing: the data runs to March 2025 and does not capture later increases in fuel prices. The office flags that separately.