"It is the duty of the Office to examine and report on the sustainability of the public finances"
Building on the recommendations of the OBR’s 2025 external review, we are publishing an initial set of our areas of research interest (ARI). These detail the OBR’s priority research questions across four areas: economy forecasting and modelling; fiscal forecasting and modelling; economic and behavioural impacts of policy; and cross-cutting issues. For all engagement with the…
Since the publication of our November 2025 Economic and fiscal outlook (EFO) we have received requests for further detail on a range of policy costings, including changes to capital gains tax relief for qualifying disposals to employee ownership trusts, reforms to the non‑domicile regime, the introduction of a high‑value council tax surcharge, changes to the…
Government debt as a share of GDP has nearly tripled over two decades, borrowing has remained around 5 per cent of GDP for the past four years, and borrowing costs are among the highest of advanced economies. Against this challenging backdrop this interim forecast update is little changed from November. GDP growth averages 1½ per…
The window in which we took average interest rates and market determinants for incorporation into the final pre-measures economy forecast was the 10 working days to 22 January. This window for interest rates in the final pre-measures fiscal forecast was the 10 working days to 30 January. This EFO will be published on the HM…
The rapid Investigation into November 2025 EFO publication error, published in December 2025, recommended that a deeper examination of recent Economic and fiscal outlook (EFO) events be urgently carried out with expert support. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) agreed to carry out this work and its report has been published today: The NCSC report…
Since the publication of our November 2025 Economic and fiscal outlook (EFO) we have received a request for further detail on both our costing of applying national insurance contributions to salary-sacrifice pension contributions, and the fiscal impact of bringing SEND spending into departmental budgets. We have published this new supplementary forecast information below and on…
Since the publication of our November 2025 Economic and fiscal outlook (EFO) we have received a request for further detail on our funded pensions forecasts. We have published this new supplementary forecast information below and on the November 2025 EFO page.
This morning’s ONS release estimates that borrowing in the first nine months of 2025-26 totalled £140.4 billion. This is £0.3 billion below the same period last year and £4.1 billion below the monthly profile consistent with our November forecast. Lower than expected borrowing for the year to date is explained by central government net borrowing, which is £2.8…
Our latest Forecast evaluation report (FER) will be published at 11am on Thursday 19 October. Our FER examines how our forecasts compare to subsequent outturn data and identifies lessons for future forecasts. This report will focus on how our March 2021 and March 2022 economy and fiscal forecasts for 2022-23 fared against the outturns.