Median household disposable income in the UK reached £39,200 in the financial year from April 2024 to March 2025, up 3.5% from the previous year, according to figures published by the Office for National Statistics on 2 October. Disposable income is the money households have available for spending and saving after direct taxes. The measure includes employment earnings, private pension and investment income, and cash benefits from the state. It is an income statistic for the survey population, not a measure of how much every household received.

The ONS adjusts income for household size and composition, a process known as equivalisation. It accounts for the number and ages of people in a household, recognising that a two-person household may need more income than a single-person household to attain a similar living standard, but not necessarily twice as much. The median identifies the middle person when individuals are ordered from poorest to richest. It is less affected than the mean by a small number of very high incomes and is used as an indicator of typical income. Neither statistic describes every household’s finances or the cost of a particular family’s basket of goods.

Income rose in both the lowest and highest fifths of the distribution. Median disposable income for the poorest fifth increased 5.6% to £18,300, returning to the level recorded in financial year ending 2020, before the coronavirus pandemic, the ONS said. The median for the richest fifth climbed 5.0% to £77,000, recovering to its financial year ending 2021 level after two years of decline. These are group medians, so the figures do not mean that every household in either fifth experienced the same increase or that the distribution within each group was unchanged.

The ONS reported little movement in its headline measures of inequality. The Gini coefficient fell by 0.2 percentage points from financial year ending 2024 to 32.7%, which the office described as relatively stable. The ratio of mean disposable income for the richest fifth to that for the poorest fifth, known as S80/S20, remained 5.6. The measures capture different aspects of the distribution and should be read together. Neither statistic alone establishes the prevalence of poverty, changes in living costs, or the effect of a particular policy.

The estimates come from the ONS Household Finances Survey, which drew on around 8,000 private households for financial year ending 2025. The achieved sample was 29% smaller than the 11,300 households recorded for the previous year. The decline followed the cessation of the Survey on Living Conditions. During this transitional year the wider survey combined Living Costs and Food Survey data with Survey on Living Conditions data; from financial year ending 2026, the ONS says it will use the Living Costs and Food Survey alone. The issued sample is planned to rise to 30,000 from April 2026.

The statistical office cautioned that smaller samples and shifts in who responded have increased uncertainty, especially for detailed income groups and retired households. Current weighting does not fully correct for every change in sample composition. Movements in decile estimates can therefore reflect sampling variation or coverage limits as well as genuine income changes. The survey covers private households, not people in institutional settings such as care homes and hostels or people experiencing homelessness; income surveys can also under-record people at both ends of the distribution. For poverty estimates, the ONS points to the Department for Work and Pensions’ Households Below Average Income series, which has a larger sample and is the primary source. The headline figures are best interpreted alongside these quality cautions and the differences between statistical series.