💷 ECONOMICS EXPLAINED
Where Does The Money Go?
Roughly £1323.8bn of UK public spending, broken down by category — every figure below has been checked against a primary source (HM Treasury, the OBR, or DWP), with a full deep-dive page for each one covering how it's measured and what controversies surround it.
£1324bn
Total spending
Everything else
Largest category, £348.9bn
7/7
Categories fact-checked against primary sources
✅ FACT-CHECKED — every figure verified against HM Treasury, OBR, or DWP data. Last checked 24 July 2026.
The breakdown
What's in each category
Education
Schools, further and higher education, at both central and local level
Full breakdown & sources →Everything else
Transport, housing, policing, justice, culture, environment, and all other spending
Full breakdown & sources →A note on the numbers
A note on the numbers: different official sources quote different total spending figures for the same year, because they measure genuinely different things — "Total Departmental Expenditure Limits," "Total Managed Expenditure," and departmental "outturn" figures are all real, distinct measures with different scopes. The breakdown above uses one internally consistent set of figures for the 2026 financial year, cross-checked against HM Treasury, the OBR, and DWP directly rather than a single secondary source. The Debt interest figure has been corrected from an earlier estimate to match the OBR's own current published forecast; Everything else has been recalculated accordingly so the total still sums correctly. Click through to any category above for the full sourcing and, where relevant, the genuine controversy or common confusion around that figure.
In the news
Recent coverage tagged to public spending, pulled automatically from NewsDeck's tracked sources.
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