Official statistics put R&D at 2.71% of the UK’s GDP in 2024

The Office for National Statistics’ gross domestic expenditure on research and development statistics for 2024 put total UK R&D spend at 2.71 per cent in 2024. This is essentially unchanged from the year before (2.72 per cent), despite an increase in cash terms of £3.6bn in R&D expenditure.

R&D in the business sector again dominates the figures, representing around 70 per cent of the UK total.

The values for the higher education sector have been estimated based on 2023 figures, as the Transparent Approach to Costing (TRAC) data which the ONS makes use of were not available in time for the release this year.

Growing the share of GDP devoted to R&D was previously a government priority, with the former Conservative administration at one point having a target of spending at least 2.4 per cent. But following a large revision in the methodology used by the national statistics body, this target was comfortably surpassed.

Notwithstanding, there have been recent calls for the UK to set a more ambitious target to match the proportion spent by some of the most research-intensive countries, which include Sweden, Switzerland, Israel and South Korea. The European Union’s own equivalent release shows that EU-wide the average R&D expenditure relative to GDP was 2.24 per cent, though with sizeable variation across its member states.