Public finances

Reviewed 14 October 2026

Okenitemode explains how UK indicators are built and read. Nothing on this page is a forecast, a recommendation, or a substitute for the official statistical bulletin. Worked numbers below are invented so the arithmetic is visible. They are not Office for National Statistics figures.

A household version, then the official names

Suppose a household earns 30 and spends 33 in a year. Borrowing that year is 3. That is the deficit: a flow. The debt is the pile of past borrowing that has not been repaid. If the pile was already 80, it is now 83, before any interest is added to the story. A smaller deficit still increases the debt. Only a surplus, or some other adjustment, brings the stock down.

In the official tables:

• Public sector net borrowing is the deficit measure you will see most often. It is the gap between public-sector receipts and expenditure in the period, on the definitions in the release.
• Public sector net debt is a stock. The version quoted in political argument often excludes public-sector banks, and sometimes excludes the Bank of England, because crisis-era and quantitative-easing balance sheets would otherwise dominate the ratio. Read the exact label on the table. “Debt” without the label is incomplete.
• Central government current receipts include most taxes. Expenditure includes services, benefits, and interest. Local government and public corporations sit inside the public-sector total.

Why January is not July

Tax arrives in lumps. Self-assessment payments, corporation tax, and VAT patterns make some months look generous and others look poor even when the underlying year is unchanged. Comparing this January with last July is usually a mistake. Compare with the same month a year earlier, and then look at the financial-year-to-date total, which runs from April.

Debt interest moves for reasons that are not a new spending decision. A sizable share of gilts is index-linked to the Retail Prices Index, so an RPI surprise changes the interest line. Conventional gilt yields affect the cost of new issuance and of refinancing, not the coupon on every bond already sold. A commentary that treats the entire interest bill as a policy choice made this month has skipped the contract terms. The price-and-yield relationship is on the Bank Rate page.

Outturn, forecast, and the rule of the day

The Office for National Statistics publishes the outturn: what the measured accounts say happened. The Office for Budget Responsibility publishes an independent forecast of the years ahead and a judgment on whether the government’s stated fiscal rules are being met. A forecast miss is not an ONS revision, and an ONS revision is not a change of policy. Keep the letterheads separate.

Fiscal rules themselves are choices. They change between governments and sometimes within them. Okenitemode does not keep a scoreboard of the current rule on this page, because a rule written into an explainer goes stale the moment Parliament is given a new one. When you read a verdict that someone has “broken the rule”, find the rule’s own wording and the OBR’s assessment rather than a paraphrase.

Ratios need a denominator

Debt as a share of GDP can fall even while the cash stock of debt rises, if GDP in current prices rises faster. It can rise because GDP fell, with no new surge in borrowing. Any sentence that ranks “the debt” across decades without saying whether it is cash or a ratio, and which debt definition, is not ready to publish. GDP’s own price and volume split is explained in the GDP note.