Britain has a habit of turning home improvement into a national pastime with the administrative charm of a minor infrastructure project. Behind the paint charts, leaking taps and mysteriously urgent trips to the builders’ merchant sits a more useful question: how much does the average household actually spend on keeping and improving the home? The Office for National Statistics offers a surprisingly revealing answer.
The £43.90 figure is really two different budgets
For the financial year ending 2025, ONS Family Spending data puts average household expenditure on maintenance and repair of the dwelling at £11.90 a week. Alterations and improvements were much higher at £32.00 a week. Added together, that is £43.90 a week, or about £2,282.80 a year when the weekly average is multiplied by 52. The source is the ONS Family Spending release.
The distinction matters. Maintenance and repair is about keeping a property working; alterations and improvements are about changing it. Treating them as one pot makes a neat headline, but it can hide the fact that households appear to spend far more on improving homes than on routine repair.
Improvement spending is nearly 2.7 times the maintenance figure
Dividing £32.00 by £11.90 gives a ratio of roughly 2.7 to one. That does not mean homeowners value new kitchens 2.7 times more than fixing a roof, nor does it tell us which individual projects took the money. It simply shows that, across the household-spending sample and categories used by ONS, the weekly average for alterations and improvements was substantially larger than the maintenance-and-repair average.
For trades businesses, that is an important commercial distinction. Repair demand is often triggered by failure: the boiler stops, the pipe leaks, the door no longer closes without negotiation. Improvement work is more likely to be planned, compared and delayed. The customer journey, therefore, can be quite different even when the same tradesperson eventually turns up with the same toolbox.
Weekly averages make lumpy jobs look deceptively tidy
An average of £11.90 a week does not mean a typical household hands a tradesperson £11.90 every Friday. Home maintenance is irregular. A household may spend almost nothing for months and then face a substantial bill in one go. The weekly figure smooths that uneven reality across households and time.
The lower-level ONS categories make the point nicely. The data records roughly £7.80 a week for house-maintenance and similar services, £1.50 for paint, wallpaper and timber, £1.40 for central-heating repairs and £1.30 for equipment hire and small repair materials. No boiler engineer is, regrettably, issuing a weekly subscription invoice for £1.40. These are statistical averages, not shopping lists.
The direction since 2023 is modest but interesting
The comparable ONS figures in the earlier financial year ending 2023 were £10.70 a week for maintenance and repair and £31.10 for alterations and improvements, a combined £41.80. Against the later £43.90 combined figure, that is an increase of about 5% in nominal weekly spending. Maintenance and repair rose by about 11%, while alterations and improvements rose by about 3%, based on straightforward calculations from the published weekly figures.
Those changes should be read carefully. They are not an inflation-adjusted measure of physical work completed, and they do not prove that households bought 11% more maintenance. Prices, household mix and project choices can all affect expenditure. The safe conclusion is simply that the reported cash averages moved upwards, with the maintenance category rising faster in percentage terms than the improvement category over those two reference points.
What the split can tell a trades business
The figures suggest two broad pools of homeowner spending: essential upkeep and discretionary or planned improvement. A plumbing, electrical, decorating or renovation firm that treats every enquiry as the same type of purchase risks missing that difference. A repair customer may care most about speed, certainty and restoring normal life. An improvement customer may spend longer comparing scope, finish, timing and alternatives.
That difference can influence quoting and communication. Repair work benefits from clear diagnosis, boundaries and next steps. Improvement work benefits from clear options, assumptions, sequencing and what is excluded. The statistics do not dictate how a firm should price, but they do explain why one generic sales script is unlikely to suit every household job.
The numbers cannot tell you what one home will cost
There is a strong temptation to turn national averages into household forecasts. That would be a mistake. The £43.90 figure includes households with different property types, tenures, ages, regions and needs. It is not a recommended annual maintenance budget and it cannot predict the cost of a particular extension, rewire, boiler repair or bathroom refit.
It also should not be mixed casually with survey figures from renovation platforms. ONS expenditure statistics and homeowner renovation surveys answer different questions and use different populations. One measures household spending categories; the other may measure activity among people who renovated. Both are useful, but statistical fruit salad remains fruit salad even if it is served in a tasteful kitchen.
A better way to read the household home-improvement budget
The most useful lesson is not that every household spends £2,282.80 a year. It is that Britain’s home-spending picture contains two distinct behaviours: keeping homes functioning and choosing to change them. In the ONS data, the second is the larger weekly category, while maintenance has shown the sharper nominal rise between the two reference periods.
For homeowners, the figures are a reminder that property costs arrive unevenly and deserve a contingency rather than wishful thinking. For trades businesses, they are a reminder that demand is not one market. A dripping tap, a heating failure and a planned renovation may all involve skilled labour, but the customer is making three very different decisions. That is a more useful insight than any national average on its own.