GDP Quarterly National Accounts: 2025 Quarter 2 (April to June)

Revisions

In this release, Scotland’s GDP has been open for revision back to 2023 Quarter 1. All estimates from 2021 onwards remain provisional, while annual estimates for earlier years are constrained to the Supply and Use Tables for 1998-2021, published on 11 December 2025. Details of revisions to GDP growth of each industry can be found in the downloadable standalone GDP volume tables, while revisions to the nominal value of other key statistics are detailed in the downloadable summary tables.

Revisions to GDP growth and the nominal value of other components have been made in line with our revisions policy for economic statistics, and are due to updated source data and re-estimation of outputs. The main sources of revisions in this release are updates to the equivalent UK national accounts which provide key inputs for the output of many industries – including mining support services, construction, financial services and health and social work – along with other components of income and expenditure. There are also revisions to the components of gross disposable household income due to the inclusion of annual benchmark data up to 2023 from the latest regional GDHI statistics produced by ONS. There are also small revisions in other industries are due to routine updates of source data, and late or revised returns to the monthly business survey.

For GDP in volume terms, the overall trend since the beginning of 2023 is broadly unchanged in the latest estimates, but with upward and downward revisions from quarter to quarter.

For other components of GDP, estimates of household and NPISH final consumption expenditure have been revised down, reflecting the changes in the latest UK statistics, while estimates government final consumption expenditure have been revised up. Revisions to estimates of changes in inventories have also been revised up, largely due to residual balancing adjustments for supply to meet the upwardly revised components of demand.

Further revisions to GDP growth can be expected in the next quarterly national accounts when estimates will be reweighted and constrained to the annual Supply and Use Tables for 1998-2022.  

Measurement of GDP and consistency with results for the UK as a whole

There are some differences between the estimates for Scotland and the UK after 2019 due to the faster timescales for updates at UK level and differences between methodologies used. While the level of output in some industries and in total GDP are still broadly comparable to the UK as a whole, for many industries those comparisons should be made with caution. Specifically, whilst the UK statistics for real terms GDP growth are based on double deflated gross value added (GVA) up to 2022 (that is, the prices of both outputs and inputs are separately accounted for) and more recent periods are based on weights from 2022, the estimates for Scotland are only double deflated up to 2021 and weighted based on 2019.

On current timescales, we are likely to introduce double deflated GDP and weights for 2022 in the release for 2025 Quarter 3, following the production of Supply and Use tables for 1998-2022 based on the ONS Regional GDP statistics for the same period (April 2025) which are derived from the ONS Blue Book 2024 statistics released in October 2024. At that time our weights will still be a year behind the equivalent UK figures, but both will then be based on economic activity after the Covid-19 pandemic and should be more comparable than they have been in recent years.

Users should continue to be cautious about drawing conclusions based on comparisons between Scotland and the UK or other countries for the periods when the economy was most severely impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, or comparisons of relative levels of GDP compared to the pre-pandemic level. The estimates of GDP from 2020 onwards are continuing to evolve as more data becomes available, and it is likely that these results will change again in future releases.