About this site
I built this to explain UK government debt and the public finances, using official data and plain English. It is independent and non-partisan. No government department, political party or campaign stands behind it.
What this is
UK Public Finances Explorer pulls together the headline measures of the UK public finances (debt, borrowing, and the interest bill) from official sources. The aim is to help you understand the numbers behind the debate, not to argue a position within it. Every figure shows its source and the date it refers to, so you can check any of it against the original.
What this is not
- It is not an official government service, and it is not endorsed by one.
- It does not take a view on what the government should do. The interactive tools let you explore trade-offs; they do not recommend any.
- It is not a forecast. Where figures look ahead, that is clearly flagged.
Who runs it
I am Anthony George (Legendary Tone), and I build and maintain this on my own as an educational project. No party, think tank or government body funds it or is connected to it. The source code is public on GitHub, so you can read exactly how any figure is calculated and any chart is drawn.
I also built the UK Migration Explorer, which does the same job for UK migration and asylum statistics: what each figure counts, where it comes from, and what it does not show. Same method, different subject.
Where the figures come from
The data is drawn from primary official sources, chiefly the ONS, the OBR, the UK Debt Management Office, HM Treasury, and the IMF for international comparisons. The sources page lists each one and what it covers.
Every figure carries its provenance in the underlying data: the value, its unit, the date it refers to, the named source, a link, and the date it was retrieved. The headline figures were last reviewed on 21 August 2026.
How confident each figure is
Every figure carries a label for how solid it is:
- official
- Taken directly from an official published release.
- provisional
- Official but flagged by the publisher as subject to revision.
- estimated
- An estimate, interpolation, or nowcast, not a published official figure.
- calculated
- Derived by this site from other figures, such as debt per person.
Figures are official data and may be revised. Historical figures before about 2010 are best estimates. Every figure shows its source on the page.
The interactive tools are models, not forecasts
The budget simulator and the big-numbers translator are teaching models, kept simple on purpose. They apply static, first-round arithmetic and nothing else. Change a tax rate and the model will not tell you how the economy responds, because it ignores growth, inflation and behaviour. Use them to see how big the trade-offs are, not to predict what would happen. Each one lists its assumptions on its own page.
Corrections
Accuracy matters more than anything else here. If you spot an error (a wrong figure, a broken or outdated source link, or a misleading description), tell me. I will fix it and record the change in the project's public history.
- Email corrections@ukpublicfinances.org, ideally with the page and the figure in question.
- Or, if you prefer, open an issue on GitHub.
Because the site is open source, every correction is visible in the commit history. There is no quiet editing.