About this site
An independent, non-partisan project that explains UK government debt and the public finances using official data and plain English. It is not affiliated with any government department, political party, or campaign.
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, and presents them factually. The aim is to help people understand the numbers behind the debate, not to argue a position within it. Every figure on the site shows its source and the date it refers to.
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
The site is built and maintained by Anthony George (Legendary Tone) as an independent educational project. It has no funding from, and no affiliation with, any party, think tank, or government body. The full source code is public on GitHub, so anyone can inspect exactly how a figure is calculated or a chart is drawn.
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 10 June 2026.
How confident each figure is
Each figure is labelled with how solid it is, so you can weigh it accordingly:
- 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 deliberately simple teaching models. They apply static, first-round arithmetic only — they do not model how the economy responds to changes in tax or spending, and they ignore growth, inflation, and behavioural effects. They are built to give an intuition for the scale of the numbers and the trade-offs involved, not to predict anything. The assumptions behind each one are shown 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 — please tell us and it will be fixed promptly, with the change recorded 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.