UK public sector spending index
PSIP tracks £1126bn of UK public spending across 162 public bodies, 37.1M published payments and 711k suppliers — all from the spending data councils and departments are required to publish. A further 57 public bodies are covered whose figures are under review and not included.
Where the money sits
Tracked spend split by tier of government.
Monthly tracked spend
Published payments by month, Dec 2010 to Jun 2026. Recent, still-filling months are excluded.
Hover any bar for the month and amount. Peak month: £54bn.
Biggest-spending public bodies
By tracked spend. Click any body for its full spend profile, suppliers and expiring contracts.
How this index is built
Every figure is aggregated from official UK transparency publications — councils’ payments over £500 and central government spend over £25,000 — normalised, with suppliers matched to the Companies House register where we can identify a registered company. The full list of covered bodies, with how current each one is, is on the coverage page. Figures reflect published payments only, for the bodies covered, so they are not a total of all public spending. The index is rebuilt nightly.
Turn this into an advantage
See what a specific buyer spends, who holds their contracts and what’s expiring — then find and win the work with tender alerts, AI scoring and bid drafting in one platform.
Frequently asked questions
How much do UK public bodies spend?
This index tracks the payments UK public bodies publish under transparency rules — councils under the Local Government Transparency Code and central government under HM Treasury guidance. The headline figure at the top of this page is the total of the payments the covered bodies have published, as loaded to date; it changes as each body publishes and as bodies are added. It counts published payments only, for the bodies currently covered, so it is not a measure of all public spending.
Which UK public bodies spend the most?
By tracked spend, central government departments dominate — the Department for Education is the single largest in this dataset, followed by other major Whitehall departments. The biggest-spenders table on this page is rebuilt nightly from the data and links through to each body’s full spend profile. Local authorities spend less individually but publish far more granular, frequent payment data.
Where does this spending data come from?
From the public bodies themselves. UK councils and government departments are legally required to publish their payments to suppliers, and PSIP ingests those official publications, normalises the inconsistent formats and matches suppliers to the Companies House register where it can identify a registered company. Where we have recorded a licence for a publisher’s files, it is almost always the Open Government Licence; for most sources we have not recorded one. Every figure traces back to a source publication — nothing is estimated or modelled.
Why do the most recent months look lower?
Transparency data is published in arrears — a payment made this month may not appear in an official file for several weeks or months. To avoid showing a misleading “drop”, the monthly trend on this page ends at the last month for which the data is substantially complete and excludes the most recent, still-filling months.
Can I look at one specific buyer?
Yes. The free Buyer Spend Lookup lets you pick any covered council or department and see its total spend, its largest suppliers and how many of its contracts are expiring. The full supplier list, incumbent payment histories and spend trends are inside PSIP.
Related: Buyer Spend Lookup · Buyer & Spend Intelligence · Data coverage