Britain is forecast to grow 1.2% in 2026. Autumn forecasts were usually close.
On 28 October the UK's official forecaster raised its growth forecast for 2026 to 1.2%. The first official figure for the year comes on 12 February.
What happened
The Office for Budget Responsibility raised its forecast for UK growth in 2026 from 1.1% to 1.2% and cut 2027 to 1%, as John Healey gave his first Budget.
The UK economy will grow 1.2% in 2026, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) says. The government’s independent forecaster gave the figure on , the day Chancellor John Healey presented his first Budget. In March it had expected 1.1% for this year. It also cut its forecast for 2027 to 1%.
In the first half of 2026 Britain grew faster than any other country in the Group of Seven (G7) large rich economies, helped in part by strong growth in business linked to artificial intelligence. The forecaster now warns that this early strength is fading because of the war in the Middle East. Since the end of February oil has risen from about $70 a barrel to more than $115, and gas prices have almost tripled.
In his Budget speech Healey pointed out that the Bank of England and the International Monetary Fund had both raised their forecasts for the UK in recent months. “Britain has beaten the forecasts this year, and with the action I am taking today I believe Britain can beat the forecasts again“, he said. The forecaster itself sees better and worse results for the economy as “of broadly equal probability“.
GDP first quarterly estimate, UK: October to . Release date: 7:00am
ONS release calendar
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) will give its first figure for growth across the whole of 2026 at 7am on , in its first estimate for October to December. Before that it publishes the first estimate for July to September on .
Sources: theguardian.com
The Pattern
We looked for cases where the Office for Budget Responsibility gave its forecast for growth in the current year on a Budget day in the autumn, and the ONS later gave its first figure for that whole year. We found five such Budgets, from 2017 to 2025. Before 2017 the autumn forecast came with a smaller Autumn Statement. Four times the first figure came within 0.3 percentage points of the forecast.
Show the other 3 cases
The Read
About 1.5% is what the year comes to if output in September stays at its August level and the last three months of the year show no growth. The ONS monthly index of output stood at 102.6 in June, 103.0 in July and 103.1 in August, so July to September is on course for growth of about 0.7%. That puts the year at the top edge of the 0.9% to 1.5% range, and a little growth at the end of the year would take the first figure to 1.6%. For the year to come in at 1.2% or lower, output in September would have to fall by more than 1% in a single month.
There are reasons for doubt. All five times it was the same forecaster and the same statistics office, and all five Budgets came after 2017. The two most recent, in 2024 and 2025, both came in 0.2 points below a forecast that had been raised during the year. In 2024 the economy grew 0.4% in December, more than economists expected, and the year still ended at 0.9%. The one big miss came in 2021, the year after the economy shrank 9.4% in the pandemic.
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