Consumer Card Spending, Flow Of Spending Across The UK - 2019 To 2023

26th March 2024

Analysis of consumer card spending trends covering where UK cardholders are spending money. This analysis shows consumer spending habits on a local level, by publishing a dataset showing where consumers originated from for merchants at every postal district across the UK.

This article includes indexed data time series on aggregated card spending flows at a postal district level broken down by merchant and cardholder locations; this allows users to explore the relationship between where cardholders live and spend over time.

Cardholders spent 74% of all face-to-face spend at merchants in the postal area where they live and 37% at merchants in the postal district where they live between January 2019 and September 2023.

The percentage of spending by residents within their local area has decreased compared with pre-coronavirus, despite evidence on the number of people working from home doubling between October to December 2019 and January to March 2022.

The highest percentage of face-to-face spend that stayed within the same region between January 2019 and September 2023 occurred in Scotland, at 87%; in comparison London and the East of England had the lowest percentage of spend staying within the region, at 76% and 75%, respectively.

Read the full ONS report with links and graphs HERE