Industries in the UK

The UK’s economy is dominated by services industries, which includes retail, hospitality and finance, as well as public services like health and education.

Other non-services industries, including manufacturing, construction, agriculture and utilities, account for around a fifth of economic output altogether. The share attributed to manufacturing over the past 30 years has decreased while the share attributed to services has increased.

Download the Excel file accompanying this briefing to see economic output and jobs data for UK industrial sectors from 1990 to 2024, including by region.

Economic output by industry

In 2023, data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows that services industries accounted for 80% of the UK’s total gross value added (GVA).

GVA is a measure of economic output that is like gross domestic product, or GDP. GVA measures the value of products and services produced minus the costs incurred in production, though not including labour costs. GDP is GVA plus taxes and minus subsidies on products.

Since 1990 the share of the economy attributed to services has grown from 70% to 80%, while the share attributed to manufacturing has decreased by a similar amount, from 17% to 9%.   

As the chart below shows, the share of the economy attributed to the other main industry groups (agriculture, mining, construction and utilities) has remained broadly stable over the same period.

A more detailed breakdown of how much each industry contributes to the UK economy is in the chart below. Services industries are shaded light green and other industries dark green.

Real estate was the largest individual industry accounting for 13.1% of GVA. However, most of this is the value of “imputed rents” which is a hypothetical estimate of what owner-occupiers would pay if they rented rather than owned their homes and not output generated by the industry.

After the real estate industry, retail and wholesale accounted for 9.9% of GVA and manufacturing 9.1%. 

Jobs by industry

Services account for an even larger share of jobs in the UK (84.8%) than they do economic output (80%).

The largest proportion of jobs are in the health and social care sector (13.5% of all jobs) and the retail and wholesale sector (12.8% of all jobs).

The chart below shows a breakdown of jobs by major industrial sectors.

Industries by country and region

London is the most atypical UK region in terms of its economic output. Services accounted for 93% of the city’s output compared to 81% across the UK in 2022, the latest ONS regional data available.

In particular, the financial services, IT and communications and professional and technical sectors are much larger in London relative to its overall economic output than the UK average.

Manufacturing on the other hand accounts for just 2% of London’s output compared to 9% across the UK.

By contrast, the north of England, Yorkshire and the Humber, the Midlands and Wales have relatively large manufacturing sectors and smaller services sectors (though services still account for over 70% of output in each of these regions).

Services dominated by public sector work (public administration and defence, education, and health and social care) and the utilities sector account for greater shares of the economies of Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the North East of England than they do across the UK overall.

The relative size of the construction sector is broadly similar across regions, though forms a larger share of the economies of the East of England (8.8%) and Northern Ireland (8,2%) than the UK overall (6.2%).

The Excel file accompanying this briefing allows users to explore economic output and jobs data by industry for each UK country and region.

Further economic indicators by country and region can be found in the Library briefing: Regional and national economic indicators.

Timeliness and updates

The data in this briefing reflects the latest data available as of 30 September 2024. Please check the source datasets using the links provided below, for the latest data.

In general, national economic output data is published every six weeks, regional jobs data every quarter and regional economic output data every year (in spring). We aim to update this briefing in conjunction with the annual regional economic output data henceforth.

The PDF briefing attached provides more information on the sources used in this breifing.