The richest fifth of households spends £1,083.60 a week; the poorest fifth £407.30.
Every media plan rests on claims about people: what they earn, what they spend, where they live, how they work. Those claims usually get sourced from a licensed tool. The Office for National Statistics publishes the same ground truth free, with the methodology attached, collected under statute and weighted by government statisticians. You already paid for it.
This is the first of a series on using it.
Start with the census
Census 2021 profiles every household in England and Wales down to a few streets, and the custom dataset builder cross-tabulates it free.
Census 2021 covers every household in England and Wales: age, occupation coded to four-digit detail, health, housing, language, travel to work. The geography goes down to output areas, and the layer above, the lower super output area, holds 1,000 to 3,000 residents. You can profile an audience at the scale of a few streets.
The custom dataset builder made it usable in a planning job. Pick your own variables, cross them, choose the geography, download.
Businesses are counted twice
Both counts are right: the register sits inside the full population.
The ONS business register counts 2.73 million businesses registered for VAT or PAYE. The government’s Business Population Estimates count 5.7 million. Both are right. The gap is 3.0 million businesses that trade without registering for either, mostly one-person operations below the VAT threshold, and 75% of all UK businesses have no employees.
So a B2B deck quoting “5.7 million businesses” as the market for a product only an employer would buy is out by roughly a factor of four. Use the register-based Business Counts when you are targeting, because those businesses are findable by industry, size band and local authority. Business Population Estimates are the right number for the whole universe, sole traders included.
The register also moves. 317,000 new businesses formed in 2024, and the five-year survival rate for the 2019 cohort was 38.4%. A new business buys banking, software, insurance and accountancy within weeks of forming, and the register lists every new registration by quarter and local authority.
People: earning and spending
ASHE prices the earner at a £39,039 median, Family Spending prices the household at £676.60 a week, and the hybrid series says where they are on a weekday.
The Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings gives median full-time pay of £39,039 as of April 2025, and it breaks by occupation, industry, age and local area, with full percentile distributions. The ASHE tables let you say which occupations, in which places, can afford the product.
”Affluent 25 to 54” is a fiction. It averages a junior doctor with a shelf stacker.
Family Spending answers the other half: average weekly household expenditure of £676.60, broken by category, region and income. The richest fifth of households spends £1,083.60 a week against £407.30 for the poorest fifth. For premium products, that table describes the buyer.
And 28% of working adults in Great Britain now hybrid work. Among people earning over £50,000 it is 45%. Any category built on commuting or lunch trade is working from the wrong geography.
Travel, health and the rest
Travel Trends splits 94.6 million trips abroad by purpose and age. The census covers health; the internet-access releases cover who buys online.
Travel Trends counted 94.6 million visits abroad by UK residents in 2024, worth £78.6 billion, split by purpose and age. The census covers health and disability by age band. The internet-access releases show who buys online and who never will.
The travel market is already counted.
Visits abroad by UK residents in 2024, worth £78.6 billion, split by purpose and age.
Measured. Note 6. · gabrielgruter.com
Getting at it
NOMIS, the custom dataset builder, Census Maps and the developer API all serve the same tables free.
NOMIS is the workhorse: free queries against the business counts, census tables and pay data, down to small-area geography. The census custom dataset builder does cross-tabulations. Census Maps puts any census variable on a zoomable map. The developer hub serves the lot over an API.
Where it breaks
The data lags by one to five years and misses the self-employed and the unregistered. The limits are published next to the numbers.
The lags are real. The pay data is about fifteen months old by the time you read it, Family Spending arrives over a year after the spending, and the census is now five years old, weakest in the places where populations change fastest. ASHE covers employees only, so the self-employed are invisible in it. The register sees no unregistered traders. The census covers England and Wales, the hybrid-working series covers Great Britain, and the latest Travel Trends is labelled “official statistics in development” after a survey redesign.
None of that is disqualifying. The limits are published next to the data, so you know what you are standing on.
The applications: business sizes, salaries and spending, geography, and the audience briefs on suits, B2B finance and travel insurance. The query stream is the other free research surface already running in your account.