Our long-term projections focus on UK-wide pressures, however many public services are devolved to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In this box, we explored how demographic trends could affect devolved spending and revenues, highlighting some of the differing implications for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
This box is based on ONS data from April 2026 .
Our projections for long-term spending and tax are based on changes in the UK population as a whole. However, many areas of spending, such as health, education and adult social care, and some taxes, are devolved to the administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Pressures associated with population ageing in these areas will, to differing extents, fall on their devolved administrations.
While we do not formally split out how these tax and spending pressures vary across the UK in our modelling, the latest ONS 2024-based population projections for the UK constituent countries provide an indication of how age-related fiscal pressures may evolve. As in the UK as a whole, the increasing share of older people in the population will impact demand for public services, particularly in health, where spending per person rises at older ages. Northern Ireland is projected to see relatively faster growth in its old-age population, as is Scotland over the first half of the projection period (Chart D). Northern Ireland and Wales are also both expected to experience slightly faster declines than the rest of the UK in their younger population, which would tend to reduce demand for education services. The extent to which each administration is exposed to demographic change, however, will also depend on the extent of its devolved responsibilities. For example, the state pension is reserved to the UK government so additional cost pressures due to ageing from this source do not fall to the devolved administrations. On taxation, Northern Ireland is less exposed to the impact on revenues of changes in the working-age population than Scotland or Wales, where a significant part of income tax is devolved.a
Chart D: Projected change in the proportion of the population aged 75 and over in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland
Source: ONS
The relationship between demographic change and the determination of the allocation of devolved funding is also important. Most devolved government funding comes from the UK government through the block grant, which is determined by the Barnett formula.b While the Barnett formula accounts for population shares on the margin, it does not account for changes to the demographic composition of the population.c So, for example, all else equal, the relatively faster ageing of the population in Scotland and Northern Ireland than in England over the next 20 years may increase health spending pressures more quickly than the associated funding, which is linked to changes in spending in England.d
Overall, however, in the long term the path of devolved funding will depend on a range of factors that we do not model, which may be equally important considerations for devolved government finances, and partly offsetting. These include changes to block grant adjustments, changes in rest-of-UK spending on devolved areas, differences in population growth, the ‘Barnett squeeze’,e and the existing composition and size of devolved spending. We do not therefore in this analysis draw firm conclusions about the impact of demographic trends on fiscal pressures in each devolved administration. Other institutions, such as the Northern Ireland Fiscal Council (NIFC) and the Scottish Fiscal Commission (SFC) have done work modelling fiscal pressures for Northern Ireland and Scotland specifically, which include many of these other factors that affect long-term devolved spending.f
This box was originally published in Fiscal risks and sustainability – July 2026