Scottish Household Survey 2025 findings: Cultural Engagement

Introduction

Culture policy context

Culture plays an important role in Scotland’s wellbeing, communities and economy. Through participation, creativity, heritage and cultural experiences, culture can contribute to people’s quality of life, strengthen community connections and provide opportunities to learn, express themselves and share ideas. [1]

This report presents findings from the 2025 Scottish Household Survey (SHS) on culture and heritage in Scotland. It examines patterns of cultural engagement, attendance and participation, alongside evidence on aspirations, barriers, public attitudes towards culture and heritage, and satisfaction with Local Authority cultural services.

The survey questions are in Changes to the Scottish Household Survey questionnaire section of the report.

About the Scottish Household Survey

The Scottish Household Survey (SHS) is an annual survey of the general population in Scotland, carried out since 1999. It aims to collect reliable and up-to-date information on a range of topics, through a random sample of people in private residences. It is a voluntary and interviewer-led survey, usually carried out face-to-face in people’s homes.

The 2025 methodology and fieldwork outcomes report provides details of the methods used. 10,538 households were interviewed for the SHS 2025 survey, between January 2025 and January 2026. The social survey is split into two parts: household survey and random adult. The questions on culture and heritage are asked in the random adult survey, which was completed by a slightly smaller sample of around 9720 people.

This publication contains the 2025 Scottish Household Survey results relating to Culture and Heritage. Prior to 2023, results from the SHS were published in one key findings report split into chapters by topic area. From 2023 onwards a new approach to reporting is being undertaken with individual topic reports being published. Links to Scottish Household results on other topics on the Scottish Household Survey results webpage.

The 2025 results are published as official statistics in line with 2022 to 2024. This is in contrast to 2020 and 2021, which were published as experimental statistics due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Results for other topics and for previous years are available on the Scottish Household Survey results webpage.

Throughout this report, references are made to tables in the accompanying Excel workbook. The workbook is published alongside this report and provides more detailed results, including breakdowns for population groups and geographic areas. Some differences between groups may be due to random sampling variation, or chance. Similarly, some apparent differences between 2023, 2024 and 2025 results may occur by chance. Standard statistical tests of significance are used to determine the likelihood of differences being due to chance. Unless otherwise stated, differences discussed in this report are statistically significant at the 95% confidence level. Some differences shown in the accompanying tables may not be mentioned in the report because they are not statistically significant.

References to activity taking place ‘in the last 12 months’ refer to the 12 months preceding an individual’s interview rather than the calendar year January to December. As interviews take place throughout the year, respondents may therefore be referring to different 12-month periods.

The data presented in this report and in the accompanying tables have been rounded to the nearest whole number. As a result, percentages may not always sum exactly to 100% and reported percentage point changes may differ slightly from calculations based on the rounded figures shown in the report.

An Official Statistics publication for Scotland

These statistics are official statistics. Official statistics are statistics that are produced by crown bodies, those acting on behalf of crown bodies, or those specified in statutory orders, as defined in the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007.

Scottish Government statistics are regulated by the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR). OSR sets the standards of trustworthiness, quality and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics that all producers of official statistics should adhere to.

More information about Scottish Government statistics is available on the Scottish Government website.

Structure of the report

The report is structured into five sections:

1. Cultural engagement in Scotland – examining overall levels of cultural engagement and how these vary across Scotland’s Local Authorities;
2. Attendance at cultural events and places – exploring attendance patterns, aspirations and barriers to attendance, and differences between population groups and geographic areas;
3. Participation in cultural activities – examining participation in cultural activities, including differences across population groups, aspirations for participation and factors limiting participation;
4. Satisfaction with Local Authority cultural services – presenting levels of satisfaction with libraries, museums and galleries, and theatres and concert halls;
5. Impact of culture and heritage – exploring public attitudes towards culture and heritage and the ways in which culture contributes to people’s lives, wellbeing and communities.

Throughout the report, findings are presented for Scotland as a whole and, where appropriate, by Local Authority and population subgroup. More detailed results are available in the accompanying Excel workbook.

Footnotes