One in six UK businesses expect to raise prices in October

One in six UK trading businesses — 17 per cent — expect to raise the prices of goods or services they sell in October 2026, according to the Office for National Statistics. That’s up from 14 per cent who said the same about September 2026, the figures show.

Construction is the sector driving the headline number hardest. Some 32 per cent of construction businesses expect to increase their prices in October — the highest proportion the industry has recorded since February 2023, when the figure stood at 35 per cent.

The data come from the ONS Business Insights and Conditions Survey, a voluntary fortnightly poll of UK businesses covering prices, financial performance, workforce and trade. The ONS classifies the published estimates as official statistics in development.

Worth keeping in mind: these are expectations, not confirmed price rises. The survey captures what businesses anticipate doing, not what consumers will actually pay — and the data don’t quantify how large any increases might be or what effect they’d have on broader consumer-price inflation.

The ONS survey does ask businesses which factors are prompting them to consider raising prices — energy costs, finance costs, labour costs, raw-material prices and transport or haulage costs are all listed — but the specific leading driver behind the October 2026 figures has not been independently verified from the available results.

For comparison, 17 per cent of trading businesses also expected to raise prices in March 2026, based on survey responses collected in February 2026. So the overall share expecting increases has returned to that earlier level after dipping in the intervening period.