Growth rates of selected output and input Producer Price Indices and Services Producer Price Indices: December 2019 to April 2025

We suspended publication of our regular bulletins for monthly Producer Price Indices (PPI) and quarterly Services Producer Price Indices (SPPI) in March 2025, as explained in our Producer Prices publications statement. The accredited official statistics status of PPI and SPPI has since been temporarily suspended.

We intend to reinstate full publication of our monthly PPI and quarterly SPPI bulletins in October 2025. This pause reflects the need for a substantial rebuild of the processing system and for the time needed to sufficiently quality assure the outputs. So far, the development work is progressing well. We will continue to keep users updated on future publication plans. There is some additional work to undertake, though further corrections are mostly expected to be small in magnitude.

However, we acknowledge the value to users of having PPI and SPPI statistics in the public domain to inform policy and decision-making. This article includes indicative estimates of a selected subset of PPI and SPPI data, including headline output and input PPI growth rates, so we can receive feedback from users on progress so far.

We use PPI and SPPI data, alongside the additional data for Import Price Indices (IPI) and Export Price Indices (EPI), as inputs to our gross domestic product (GDP) and trade statistics. The PPI, IPI and EPI data for 2025 in the accompanying dataset are consistent with the inputs used to derive chained volume measures published in our GDP monthly estimate, UK: April 2025 bulletin on 12 June, our UK trade: April 2025 bulletin on 12 June, and our GDP quarterly national accounts, UK: January to March 2025 bulletin on 30 June. The SPPI data are expected to be included in the June 2025 editions of our monthly GDP and UK trade bulletins and in the Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025 first quarterly estimate, to be released on 14 August.

The full implementation of historical data is being managed in line with the national accounts revision policy. The publication of the indicative dataset today will ensure greater transparency around some of the key inputs being used in our GDP and UK trade statistics.

In our Producer Prices publications statement, we set out how a problem with the implementation of chain-linking methods had led to errors in Producer Price Indices (PPI), Import Price Indices (IPI), Export Price Indices (EPI), and Services Producer Price Indices (SPPI) data back to 2008. We moved to an annual chain-linking approach to produce PPI in November 2020, as described in our Chain-linking in business prices article. This was partly to help introduce double-deflated estimates of output into GDP. This was a substantial improvement on the PPI methods being used at the time.

The aggregation of lower-level component price series into higher-level aggregates involves combining price relatives (the price of an item relative to its price in the base period) and suitable weights (calculated using sales data). Under an annual chain-linking approach, these price relatives are re-referenced and weights are updated on an annual basis. The more frequent updating of weights ensures that more up-to-date information on sales is used to inform the weighting. However, the new chain-linking method was coded up incorrectly in our production system. The price relatives were not being reset to 100 in each annual rebasing process. This means that historical price movements were effectively distorting the weights being applied in more recent periods.

The problem with not re-referencing the price relatives has been addressed in this article, and we have completed initial rounds of quality assurance. However, users should be aware that some further corrections to the data, which are expected to be small in magnitude, are also planned.

The corrected price relatives have not yet been fed through to the calculations of the component weights, which will therefore be revised. Component weights are generated from sales data (mainly from Office for National Statistics surveys). Those data are only available with a lag, so they need to be “price updated” in order to estimate the sales for the required base year, to align with the underlying index methodology.

As testing work continues and production moves across to the rebuilt pipelines that will be used for our monthly bulletins in the future, we cannot rule out that other, similar corrections may be required.

We have therefore decided to release an indicative PPI/SPPI dataset today. However, we want to be open and transparent with users about the remaining work still to be undertaken before the full reintroduction of PPIs and SPPIs in October 2025.

This dataset contains annual and monthly growth rates from December 2019 to April 2025 for a selection of important series, including headline output and input PPI. These data are not accredited official statistics and should be used with caution, reflecting the strengths and limitations discussed in this article.

When monthly production is reinstated, we will make the full PPI and SPPI datasets available again, with time series data for the full range of individual price indices that were regularly published before the pause. We also intend to apply to the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) to seek the reinstatement of the accredited official statistics status of the data.

The impact of these changes on headline PPI and SPPI is in line with the initial expectation set out in our Producer Prices publications statement. The effects are mixed for different products and industries, but the largest effects on PPI and SPPI inflation rates are in 2022 and 2023. The largest impact on the headline output PPI annual inflation rate was in July 2023, with a 1.4 percentage points increase. Over the whole period covered by this data (December 2019 to April 2025), the average annual inflation rate of output PPI is now estimated to be 4.9%, compared with 4.4% before the methods correction. We will publish a more detailed impact analysis when we restart monthly publication.

The impact of the changes on published estimates of headline gross domestic product (GDP) growth for 2025 is expected to be negligible.

User engagement

We have worked closely with experts to develop these improved methods. We secured agreement to the improved chain-linking method from both our internal Methodology Review Group and the independent Advisory Panel on Consumer Prices (Technical). The recommended approach uses a Laspeyres-type method and is consistent with international best practice. Those two groups also recommended that the approach for price updating weights should be corrected.

We have continued to engage bilaterally with all of our key users as the work to reinstate PPI and SPPI has progressed. We will continue to provide regular updates while we rebuild the production system and restore quality.

Future plans for Producer Price Indices development

We intend to resume the publication of our monthly PPI and quarterly SPPI in October 2025. We will notify users before the planned publication date. We will also publish a full impact analysis of the revisions and an updated PPI/SPPI development plan alongside that publication. This will explain how we plan to address issues highlighted with PPI/SPPI in previous reviews, including the choice of samples and the need to uplift the processing system.

Some of the challenges facing business prices production at the present time and our plans for steadily addressing those issues are set out in our recent Economic Statistics Plan. This will involve a multi-year development programme.

The plan also highlights that restoring quality and confidence in our economic statistics will mean revising previously published series in some cases. This is a sign of a statistical system that is evolving and improving, led by evidence, and open about how it improves. We will keep users informed of future revisions and corrections we expect to make to these data.

We would welcome feedback on these indicative data by email to business.prices@ons.gov.uk.