Construction Output MoM

Construction Output MoM is the month-on-month % change in construction work done in Great Britain. It counts chargeable building and civil engineering work, excluding VAT and payments to subcontractors. It covers England, Scotland and Wales only, excluding Northern Ireland and property development under UK SIC 2007 class 41.1.

It excludes payments to external consultants and differs from the Construction PMI sentiment survey and from new orders. Published by the Office for National Statistics monthly since January 2010, it draws on about 8,000 firms from about 320,000.

It tracks about 6.0% of the economy by gross value added.

Responses cover each calendar month, with calendar-day correction when firms report non-calendar periods. It appears about 6 weeks after month-end, around day 10 of the second following month at 7:00am UK time on a pre-announced calendar. March, June, September and December releases add quarterly new orders and Construction Output Price Indices. It is published alongside the GDP monthly estimate, services, production and trade on short-term output theme day.

Revisions follow National Accounts Revisions Policy for late returns, VAT data, re-estimated seasonal factors and price updates. Seasonal factors are re-estimated each month and reviewed yearly, and revisions appear in one-month and three-month triangles. No bias adjustment has been applied since May 2020.

Headline all work equals new work plus repair and maintenance across 9 sectors, with no fixed published weights. Components move with housing, infrastructure, commercial work and maintenance.

• Public new housing: new house-building for public clients.

• Private new housing: new house-building for private clients, the largest housing part of new work.

• Infrastructure new work: water, sewerage, electricity, roads, railways and harbours, often the largest monthly mover.

• Other new work: schools, hospitals, offices, factories, warehouses and shops for public and private clients.

• Housing repair and maintenance: upkeep of public and private homes, often offsetting new-work swings.

• Non-housing repair and maintenance: upkeep of commercial buildings and infrastructure.

The December 2021 bulletin, released 11 February 2022, showed output up 2.0% to £14,514m. New work rose 3.5% while repair and maintenance fell 0.7%. Infrastructure new work jumped 8.5% and private new housing rose 3.1%, while all maintenance sectors fell. December stood 0.3% above February 2020, with new work 2.0% below and maintenance 4.5% above.

Annual growth hit 12.7% in 2021 after a 14.9% fall in 2020. Downward revisions to September and November 2021 cut the recovery from 1.3% to 0.3% above February 2020. The bulletin said output had recovered less than previously estimated.

1. Chargeable work: record building work billed in the calendar month, excluding VAT and subcontractor payments, with day adjustment for off-calendar returns.

1. Ratio-of-means imputation: fill gaps from peer ratios, so a £12.0m-register firm imputes £2.40m at a 0.20 ratio.

1. Survey weighting: gross up to population totals, covering all firms with 100 or more staff. Firms with 10 to 99 staff and £60m turnover or more are also fully covered.

1. VAT benchmarking: blend VAT turnover for small and medium firms since December 2017 to improve coverage.

1. Chained volume measure: sum new work and maintenance in cash terms then strip prices with output indices, so £14,000m at index 125.0 gives £11,200m.

1. Seasonal adjustment and growth: apply X-13-ARIMA-SEATS at sector level then aggregate. For example, £11,150m versus £11,100m gives +0.5% month-on-month, the MoM reading.

1. Subnational splits: estimate quarterly splits below national level from Barbour ABI project data, constrained to the headline total.