How we work

Every figure on this site is an official statistic, or is calculated directly from official statistics, and links to the exact table and cell it came from. This page explains what the figures measure and the checks they pass before they're published.

Sources

• United Kingdom: Office for National Statistics (ONS), Annual Business Survey for industry turnover, value added and business counts; Monthly Business Survey for the latest year's growth.
• Germany, France, Spain and Italy: Eurostat structural business statistics for turnover, value added, businesses and employment; Eurostat short-term business statistics for the latest year's growth.
• Exchange rates: Eurostat's official annual average rates, used only to compare countries in euros.
• Where an industry needs it: other official publishers, such as the Gambling Commission for gross gambling yield.

All of these are published under open licences that allow reuse with attribution. We don't use figures from paywalled reports or market research sellers.

What "market size" means here

A market size on this site is the total turnover of the businesses whose main activity is the industry, in the latest year official statisticians have published. It's the industry's sales, including exports and excluding VAT. It isn't the same as what customers in the country spend, which would also include imports. Industries are defined by the official European classification (NACE Rev. 2) and its UK equivalent (SIC 2007).

For a few industries, official turnover isn't what people usually mean by market size: gambling, where turnover can include total stakes, or staffing agencies, whose turnover includes the pay of temporary workers. Those pages carry a note directly under the headline figure.

Two kinds of number

• Reported: published by the statistics office, shown exactly as published.
• Calculated: worked out only from reported figures, such as a percentage change or a currency conversion. The page says how.

We don't publish estimates. We tested a model that projects the latest official figures forward a year, checked it against years that had already been published, and fewer than half of its projections came within five per cent. That isn't good enough to put next to official figures, so we show the latest official number and, separately, the latest official growth signal for the wider industry.

Checks before anything is published

• Every figure is stored with its publisher, dataset, retrieval date and exact cell. The build stops if any number on a page is missing its source.
• Before each release, every figure is read again a second way (from a different download or the original spreadsheet) and compared. Any mismatch stops the release.
• Figures the publisher withholds for confidentiality are shown as withheld, never filled in.
• Breaks in a series and provisional figures carry the publisher's own flags.

Comparing countries

UK figures are the ONS's "total turnover"; other countries show Eurostat's "net turnover". The two measures are close but not identical, and countries sometimes classify the same kind of business differently. Pages flag this where it matters.

Corrections

If you think a figure is wrong, email [email protected]with the page. We check it against the source and correct it, or explain why it stands.