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Procurement statistics: a short guide

One of the ways in which the Government achieves its goals is to buy goods and services. This is called procurement, and covers a wide range of things, from the purchase of printer paper to commissioning social care.

This is a short guide to the main sources of procurement statistics for the UK, with headline figures.

Overall figures

There are two main sources for data on how much the public sector is spending on procurement in total across the UK.

The Whole of Government Accounts

The Treasury’s Whole of Government Accounts is possibly the most useful source overall for looking at how much the public sector buys from the private sector. 

Figures are ‘consolidated’ so do not include spending by the public sector on other bits of the public sector, broadly speaking (this is a slight simplification: see the Whole of Government Accounts documents and annexes for more details). This means that the headline figure is probably the best estimate of procurement spending by the public sector buying from the private sector.

The latest data is currently for 2024/25 when £395 billion was spent on procurement.

Procurement accounts for about a third of public sector spending (35% in 2024/25).

Source: HM Treasury, Whole of Government Accounts, various years. See the source for details of data missing from the accounts. This has become a particular issue for local government.

Most procurement spending falls under the category ‘purchase[s] of goods and services’ in the Whole of Government Accounts – this category can be broken down into central government, local government & other public sector, with some figures for government departments and devolved administrations. Totals are also given for certain high level categories of spending, such as ‘ICT outsourcing and support’. See Note 8 of Whole of Government Accounts 2024/25 for these breakdowns, along with PQ 12225 [on Public Expenditure], 29 June 2026, for more organisations.

These figures are not adjusted for inflation.

Public Spending Statistics

The Treasury’s Public Spending Statistics and Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses (PESA) give more recent figures but include the procurement of goods and services by one public sector body from another.

Gross spending on public sector procurement was £461 billion in 2025/26 across the UK.

This was an increase by £23 billion or 5% compared with the previous year. 

These figures can be broken down by area of spending, as shown in the chart.

Source: HM Treasury, Public Expenditure Statistical Analysis 2026, 16 July 2026 - tables 5.5 and 5.6

- Plans

Published budgets suggest procurement spending will increase by around 10% in 2026/27, according to data from tables 2.2 and 2.3 of HM Treasury, Public Expenditure Statistical Analysis 2026. Note that these figures are based on government budgets which do not cover the full public sector, unlike the figures quoted above. 

- Data notes

• Current and capital procurement are shown separately in Public Spending Statistics and Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses (PESA) – the figures can be added together to give a total for all procurement. Broadly speaking current procurement is day to day spending (from printer paper to social care). Capital procurement is spending on fixed assets such as buildings or major IT projects.
• Public Spending Statistics are published four times a year. Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses (PESA) is published once a year, in the summer, and has more detail. Figures in them should match, although Public Spending Statistics may have more recent revised data.
• None of these figures are adjusted for inflation.

Other useful sources

Procurement from small businesses

- Government figures

The Cabinet Office published Central government spend with SMEs each year up to 2021/22. The last edition suggests that 26.5% of central government procurement spending went to SMEs in 2021/22 – 12.3% directly and 14.1% indirectly, through the supply chain. These figures were ‘management information published in the interests of transparency’. They should be treated with a bit of caution, especially when looking at changes over time, as the methods used to produce them have changed.

In the future, government departments should publish their own spend with SMEs on an annual basis.  Government departments have targets for direct spend with SMEs covering the three years 2025/26, 2026/27 and 2027/28. These are published in reports on the government’s Small and Medium Business Hub. These reports can contain data for earlier years.

Departments should publish their progress against the targets by the end of September for the previous financial year – for example they should have published data for 2025/26 by 30 September 2026.

- Other data

Tussell and the British Chambers of Commerce publish a SME procurement tracker based on transparency data (see below for more on transparency data). The 2026 edition suggests that 21% of all public sector procurement, by value, went directly to SMEs. The proportion of spending with SMEs is highest for local government (34%), followed by the NHS (16%) and central government (10%).

The Open Contracting Partnership have published analysis of contracts under the Procurement Act 2023, which includes some figures for the proportion of contracts with SME suppliers: Open Contracting Partnership, The UK Procurement Act one year on: what does the data tell us? 3 March 2026.

Procurement from abroad

The European Commission have published studies that look at the location of suppliers for procurement by the public sector - the most recent is European Commission, Study on the measurement of cross-border penetration in the EU public procurement market, May 2021.

This showed that:

• For contracts worth up to €200 million, 2.3% of contracts (by value) were awarded directly to foriegn suppliers while 17.6% were awarded to suppliers controlled by foreign companies
• For contracts worth over €200 million, 2.1% of contracts (by value) were awarded directly to foriegn suppliers while 31.5% were awarded to suppliers controlled by foreign companies

The analysis is largely based on records of tender and contract awards in the EU TED database, for 2016-2019. Contracts only needed to be included if they were over certain thresholds, so the statistics are only for larger contracts. The latest report includes figures for the UK, as the UK was still using the database for the period covered by the report.

Transparency data

Data on particular types of procurement spending is often quoted in the media. Much of this comes from the variety of tender, contract award and transparency spending data that the government and other public bodies publish, for example through Find a Tender and Contracts Finder.

This data generally requires extraction, processing and analysis to give meaningful statistics, and data can still be patchy even after this work is done. 

There are organisations that publish, and sometimes sell, figures based on this data, including Tussell, Spend Network and the Open Contracting Partnership.

National Audit Office

The National Audit Office (NAO) produce reports from time to time that include figures and analysis on procurement – see their list of reports under their procurement and contract management theme.