Business R&D spending is growing, but real-terms growth is slower than the headline suggests
Is British business investing in research and development? Total spend, who funds it, and which broad industries perform it — every figure traced to ONS's Business Enterprise Research and Development (BERD) statistics.
£55,615m
UK business R&D expenditure, current prices, 2024
£55,615m
Same, Constant prices, 2024 reference year (ONS R&D deflator), 2024
UK business R&D expenditure (current prices)
UK business R&D spending has grown steadily in current-price terms — the real-terms chart below shows how much of that is genuine growth versus inflation.
View data table
| Year | UK business R&D expenditure (current prices) |
|---|---|
| 2018 | 40993 |
| 2019 | 42184 |
| 2020 | 43995 |
| 2021 | 46929 |
| 2022 | 50841 |
| 2023 | 53195 |
| 2024 | 55615 |
United Kingdom · Source: Office for National Statistics, Business enterprise research and development, UK (Accredited Official Statistics) · series Table 1a — Current prices (£ millions) · as of 2024
UK business R&D expenditure (constant 2024 prices)
Adjusted for R&D-specific inflation, growth has been slower and less consistent than the current-price figure alone suggests.
View data table
| Year | UK business R&D expenditure (constant 2024 prices) |
|---|---|
| 2018 | 49759 |
| 2019 | 50658 |
| 2020 | 52653 |
| 2021 | 55788 |
| 2022 | 54440 |
| 2023 | 54354 |
| 2024 | 55615 |
United Kingdom · Source: Office for National Statistics, Business enterprise research and development, UK (Accredited Official Statistics) · series Table 1a — Constant prices (2024) (£ millions) · as of 2024
Who funds business R&D?
R&D expenditure by funder, UK
The large majority of business R&D is funded from businesses' own funds; overseas funding is a meaningful and growing second source, government funding a smaller third.
View data table
| Year | Own funds | UK government | Overseas | Other UK businesses |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 40400 | 2971 | 6307 | 1041 |
| 2023 | 41406 | 3573 | 7266 | 842 |
| 2024 | 42415 | 3773 | 8352 | 922 |
United Kingdom · Source: Office for National Statistics, Business enterprise research and development, UK (designated as Official Statistics) · as of 2024
Manufacturing versus services
R&D expenditure by broad industry, UK
Manufacturing and services perform broadly comparable amounts of business R&D — a reminder that UK innovation spending is not solely a factory-floor story.
View data table
| Year | Manufacturing | Services |
|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 24226 | 23748 |
| 2023 | 25980 | 24452 |
| 2024 | 27280 | 25548 |
United Kingdom · Source: Office for National Statistics, Business enterprise research and development, UK (designated as Official Statistics) · as of 2024
How this is calculated, and what "evidence class" means
- A — Observed official statistic — the two total-expenditure series (current price and real terms), ONS's headline Accredited Official Statistics release.
- B — Official/admin statistic with methodological limitations — the funder and industry breakdowns, published in ONS's separate (non-accredited) BERD dataset.
ONS discontinued the BERD Timeseries API dataset in 2021 (frozen since, no longer updated) — figures on this page come from ONS's two current XLSX releases instead. The funder and industry breakdowns are shown only from 2022 onward because ONS itself states 2022-2024 figures follow a new sampling methodology and "are not directly comparable with previous years, with the exception of the UK totals" — which is why the two total-expenditure series above run a longer history than the breakdowns. R&D as a share of GDP is not shown: ONS's own directly-published ratio is one of the discontinued time-series codes, and computing one from mismatched sources was judged not worth the risk of a misleading ratio — a real, documented gap, not an oversight. Regional and R&D-employment breakdowns exist in the same source but were not wired this session.