GDP Quarterly National Accounts: 2026 Quarter 2 (April to June)

Revisions

This release includes revisions to GDP and its components from Quarter 1 (January to March) 2023 to Quarter 2 (January to March) 2026. Revisions are due to updates to source data for various components of the quarterly national accounts, including the use of changed or late responses to business surveys. In this release the main source of revisions is where estimates for Scotland are based on the equivalent UK GDP data published in the latest ONS UK quarterly national accounts. The latest UK release included revisions to all time periods and the significant annual updates for consistency with the annual national accounts Blue Book 2026, which will be released on 30 October 2026. 

Details of revisions to GDP growth of each broad industry can be found in the standalone GDP by volume tables, while revisions to the nominal value of other key statistics are detailed in the quarterly national accounts summary tables.

In annual terms, real GDP growth has been unrevised in 2023 at 0.7%, revised up to 1.6% in 2024 (previously 1.2%), and revised down to 1.2% in 2025 (previously 1.3%).

The most significant upward revisions since the start of 2023 can be seen within the services subsectors of real estate, financial and insurance activities, and health and social work, most of which are derived from the equivalent UK series. The upward revision to real estate services includes new data on imputed rentals from the recent ONS regional accounts. The most significant downward revisions can be seen in mining and quarrying, and transport and storage services.

This publication also includes revisions to the components of gross disposable household income (GDHI) in all years due to the inclusion of new annual benchmark data up to 2024 from the latest regional GDHI statistics produced by ONS.

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

As discussed in previous releases there can be differences between the estimates of GDP for Scotland and the UK as a whole due to the faster timescales for updates at UK level and differences between methodologies used. At the present time, UK statistics for real terms GDP growth are based on double deflated GVA and weights up to 2024 (that is, the prices of both outputs and inputs are separately accounted for), while the estimates for Scotland are double deflated up to 2022, with estimates for 2023 onwards based on deflated output only. These differences are unavoidable, and while we aim for coherence at the level of total GDP, users should be conscious of the potential for differences when making comparisons of detailed components in recent years.

Users should also 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 due to the higher level of uncertainty during these periods and differences in data sources and methods used.