Recent release · historical context
UK online retail data, with the dates attached.
Official monthly observations through September 2026, from the ONS release published 23 October. Reviewed and normalized on 24 October. Earlier months remain historical observations.
What this collection contains
16,063 monthly observations across 73 official series, from November 2006 to September 2026. These include spending value, index levels, growth rates and online shares. They are different measures, not values to add together.
Download the normalized monthly series (CSV) · eight columns, with units, adjustment basis and original source cells.
Download the original September-vintage ONS workbook (XLSX). All source tables and notes are preserved.
Read the manifest and checksums · download the source category comparison (CSV).
Source, licence and dates
Source: Office for National Statistics, Retail Sales Index internet sales, released 23 October 2026. Read the accompanying September bulletin. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Plain Reckoner normalized the tables; this is not an official ONS product or endorsement.
Next release is scheduled for 20 November 2026. This is the reviewed October publication vintage; later releases can revise earlier months. A check date does not change the observation period.
How to reproduce it
- Download the workbook and sector-comparison CSV linked from the official source pages.
- Run
scripts/measure-retail-market.pywith the workbook, chart CSV and an output directory. - Read monthly rows only. Exclude separate revision tables, which reuse series codes but report changes to a previous release.
- Keep blank cells absent. Deduplicate by series code and month, rejecting conflicting values. Normalize to six decimal places to remove spreadsheet serialization artifacts.
- Keep units and seasonal adjustment attached to every observation. Retain the source sheet and cell for tracing.
The parser removed 478 repeated series cells. They are not additional observations. Workbook SHA-256: 5ff930c71fd4455bbf1f86e53496d3e6b3bed6edae23f468358b1006d0dc02a3.
Limits that matter
These are survey estimates of aggregate retail activity in Great Britain. They are not individual purchases, store profit or a forecast for a product. Values at current prices differ from inflation-adjusted volumes. Seasonally adjusted and unadjusted series differ. Aggregate categories overlap with their subgroups: do not sum every row or average percentage changes to recreate the overall result.