The flat line in Britain’s family spending: what UK households really spend on personal care

What Britain actually spends on looking after itself — and the one category that behaves like nothing else in the household budget.

Every June the Office for National Statistics publishes Family Spending in the UK, the closest thing this country has to an honest ledger of where household money goes. The latest edition, covering April 2024 to March 2025, landed on 11 June 2026. Average weekly household spending reached £676.60 — up £53.30, or 9%, on the year before, and around 5% up once inflation is stripped out. It is still roughly 10% below where it stood in the year to March 2020.

Those are the headline numbers, and they were widely reported. What follows is not. We pulled the underlying workbook and looked at a narrower question: how does spending on personal care and the home change as households get richer? The answer for one of those categories turned out to be genuinely strange.

Food falls, clothing climbs, personal care refuses to move

Economists have known since the nineteenth century that food takes a shrinking share of the budget as income rises — Engel’s law, and the ONS data obeys it almost perfectly. The poorest tenth of households spend 13.6% of everything they spend on food and non-alcoholic drinks. The richest tenth spend 8.1%. Clothing moves the other way, climbing steadily from 2.05% to 2.79%.

Personal care does neither. Across all ten income deciles it sits between 1.81% and 2.19%, with no trend in either direction — a nearly flat line running the entire width of the income distribution.

View the data

% of total spend	D1	D2	D3	D4	D5	D6	D7	D8	D9	D10
Food & non-alcoholic drinks	13.64	13.55	12.41	12.44	12.03	11.82	11.68	10.23	9.92	8.07
Clothing & footwear	2.05	2.56	2.56	2.65	2.68	2.54	2.69	2.69	2.78	2.79
Personal care	2.02	2.05	1.85	1.81	1.91	2.04	1.84	1.99	2.19	1.84

In cash terms the gap is real enough: the poorest tenth spend £6.20 a week on personal care, the richest £24.40. But because the richest tenth spend 4.3 times as much on everything, personal care ends up occupying almost exactly the same slice of the budget at both ends. Whatever else a household cuts, it appears to keep buying shampoo, soap and haircuts in proportion. It is worth holding that in mind when thinking about how people choose skincare gift sets, where the assumption is usually that spending scales neatly with income.

The categories that stretch — and the one that doesn’t

A more revealing way to read the same workbook is to ask, for each category, how many times more the richest tenth spends than the poorest. Total household spending stretches by a factor of 4.3. Anything above that line is a category the wealthy disproportionately pour money into; anything below it is one where extra income barely changes behaviour.

Two things stand out. Household textiles — cushions, throws, bed linen, curtains — stretches by only 2.4 times, the flattest figure in our selection and well under half the stretch of furniture and furnishings at 5.5. Soft furnishings appear to be the point at which a home is “done” at a fairly low income; the money that arrives later goes into furniture, not fabric. That fits what we see with pieces like outdoor scatter cushions and quilted throws — modest, replaced fairly often, and rarely where a bigger budget goes.

And toiletries and soap stretches by just 3.0 — below the all-category line, and the second-flattest thing here. There is a ceiling on how much soap a household can use, and it is reached early.

A pattern we expected and did not find

Before running the numbers we assumed a clean story: that as income rises, personal-care spending would tilt away from products and toward services — fewer boxes of hair dye, more salon appointments. In aggregate there is a hint of it. Spending on hairdressing and beauty treatments stretches by 5.3 times across the income range, against 4.3 for hair products and cosmetics.

But decile by decile the ratio of services to products is noisy and non-monotonic — 1.00 in the poorest tenth, dropping to 0.71 in the middle, back to 1.23 at the top. There is no clean gradient. We are reporting the aggregate difference and explicitly not claiming the trend, because the underlying data does not support it.

Notes on method and limitations

• All figures are average weekly household expenditure, UK, financial year ending March 2025, from ONS Family Spending Workbook 1, Table 3.1 (detailed household expenditure by disposable-income decile group), released 11 June 2026.
• Share-of-budget percentages and the richest-to-poorest ratios are our own calculations from that table. They are not published by the ONS in this form.
• Deciles are by disposable income, not equivalised income — so they do not adjust for household size. Larger households cluster toward the upper deciles, which inflates some cash figures at the top.
• The ONS also publishes a regional breakdown, but it is a three-year average covering FYE 2023 to FYE 2025 and is therefore not comparable with the single-year figures above. That is why its UK total reads £622.60 rather than £676.60, and why we have not mixed the two.
• The Living Costs and Food Survey is a sample of roughly 5,000 UK households. Small sub-categories carry meaningful sampling error; we have avoided drawing conclusions from the smallest cells.

Source: Office for National Statistics, Family Spending in the UK: April 2024 to March 2025, released 11 June 2026. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.