UK Trade Deficit Narrows to £9.0 Billion in Three Months to July 2026

Official ONS figures show the total underlying trade deficit fell by £1.1 billion in the three months to July 2026, though the annual gap has nearly doubled compared with the previous year.

The UK’s total underlying trade deficit narrowed by £1.1 billion to £9.0 billion in the three months to July 2026, the Office for National Statistics reported. The “underlying” measure strips out volatile items such as non-monetary gold and certain precious metals, giving a cleaner read on core trade flows — but set against the annual picture, the short-term improvement sits alongside a much larger trend in the opposite direction.

The figures show that the UK’s overall trade deficit for the 12 months ending June 2026 reached £50.4 billion, up from £25.3 billion in the 12 months ending June 2025 — a near-doubling year-on-year, according to the Department for Business and Trade’s Trade and Investment Core Statistics Book. Behind that headline sits a goods deficit of £260.5 billion, only partially offset by a services surplus of £210.1 billion for the same period.

The EU relationship remains the dominant fault line. In 2025, the UK ran a trade deficit with the EU of £90.3 billion, compared with a surplus of £50.8 billion with non-EU countries, the figures show.

For Kent, this matters more than it might for other parts of England. The South East accounted for 17.3 per cent of all exporters in Great Britain in 2024 — second only to London’s 29.6 per cent. Kent sits at the heart of that exporting base, with Dover and Folkestone handling a big share of UK-EU goods traffic. Any sustained shift in the underlying trade position feeds directly into demand for logistics, haulage, and manufacturing capacity across the county.

Whether the three-month narrowing reflects stronger exports, weaker imports, or a combination of both is not broken down in the ONS release. It’s worth treating the short-term figure with some caution — ONS acknowledged an error in one worksheet of its UK trade goods and services publication tables in mid-July 2026, with the affected series then updated.

The annual deficit widening tells a different story to the three-month improvement. Both figures are real; they just measure different things.