One in four UK adults struggling financially despite GDP growth, ONS data shows

Around one in four UK adults — about 25 per cent — report finding it fairly or very difficult to get by financially, even as GDP per head rose by around 0.9 per cent in the first quarter of 2026 compared with the same period a year earlier. That gap between headline economic growth and lived experience sits at the heart of the ONS’s latest quarterly release of its Beyond GDP insights bulletin, first published on 27 February 2026.

The bulletin tracks seven headline measures: life satisfaction, trust in others, self-reported health status, the proportion of young people not in education, employment or training (NEET), GDP per head, trust in government, and greenhouse gas emissions per head. The figures show that progress has not been consistent across individual, community and national well-being — the ONS’s own assessment of its data.

GDP per head tells the most positive short-term story. The 0.9 per cent year-on-year rise builds on a longer-term gain of around 11 to 12 per cent compared with Quarter 1 2021. But economic output is only one of the seven measures, and the others paint a more mixed picture.

In April 2026, around 64 per cent of UK adults said they felt hopeful about their future. Yet around 18 per cent reported feeling very or somewhat unfairly treated by society — a figure that showed no meaningful change over the previous year. Consumer confidence remained low, and the ONS notes that trust in government and trust in other people continue to present challenges with limited progress.

The seven-measure quarterly framework was introduced after a review of the national well-being programme, designed to give policymakers more timely, internationally comparable data aligned with United Nations recommendations on measuring progress beyond GDP. A broader set of around 60 indicators is still published annually through the UK Measures of National Well-being dashboard, but the headline quarterly bulletin is now the faster-moving signal. Critics of headline frameworks argue that seven indicators risk masking regional disparities and inequalities between groups — above all on issues such as housing quality and mental health — that don’t surface in aggregate national figures.

Personal well-being estimates — covering life satisfaction, how worthwhile people find their activities, happiness and anxiety — are drawn from the Annual Population Survey and feed into the headline framework each quarter.