Economic Nowcast for June 2026

The Smart Data Foundry Economic Nowcast has been updated for June 2026, and shows that, at national level, there has been a 4.1 percentage point increase in the proportion of people spending more than their income, and an 11.9% decline in median weekly income.

The Nowcast also provides regional breakdowns for England, Scotland and Wales, and these show an uneven picture in economic wellbeing trends across the three nations.

Our Economic Nowcast is updated monthly and is designed to equip policymakers, analysts, and service providers with the timely insights necessary for proactive, data-informed decision-making.

By leveraging real-world, near real-time data, the Nowcast provides economists and policymakers with an up-to-date view of the current economic landscape. This complements official statistics and strengthens their ability to access the timely information required to respond to shifting economic challenges quickly and effectively.

Behind the numbers: June's Nowcast

Note on this month's sample: two of the weeks feeding into the June observation came in with a smaller sample than usual (around 4 million records rather than the usual 5 million). The two affected weeks are typically the weeks in which most salaries are paid, which could have an onward effect on our income and living beyond means metrics this month.

Living beyond means

This indicator tracks the proportion of people spending more than their income (a combination of salary, pensions and benefits). We compare mid-month data with data from the middle of the previous month, which avoids the spikes in the numbers that salary events could otherwise cause.

Living beyond means is a metric which can highlight rising financial vulnerability, seasonal impacts on living standards and the impact of economic events such as energy price hikes, redundancies and policy changes.

Across Great Britain (GB), the proportion of people living beyond their means rose from 11.4% to 15.5% - a 4.1 percentage point increase on the previous observation.

In a typical month, Living Beyond Means would fluctuate by 1-2% indicating that data quality could have impacted the metric this month. Data was observed in June, prior to the energy price cap uplift, and ONS reports that inflation slowed in June to 2.6% following spikes in the spring.

What's the regional picture?

The regional breakdown shows the increase was felt everywhere, but not evenly. England rose 2.8 percentage points to 13.9%, Wales rose 2.6 points to 12.9%, and Scotland saw the smallest increase, up 1.3 points to 13.6%.

Median weekly income

This indicator tracks median weekly income from salary, benefits and pensions, again comparing mid-month data with the middle of the previous month to avoid salary-related spikes.

GB median weekly income fell from £344.54 (£17,916 annually) to £303.55 (£15,785 annually) over the month - a drop of £40 per week (£2,131 annually), or -11.9%.

Whilst some fluctuation month on month is expected, this is a significant swing on previous months, and indicates that this metric could be affected by the data sampling issues noted above.

Small business productivity

Small business productivity is a quarterly metric, produced by analysing anonymised financial data from Sage accounting customers. It measures the average revenue per employee.

In Q1 2026, SME productivity was £10, 883 per employee – a decline of 2.26% on Q4 2025. Though this is a 1.96% improvement on Q1 2025, Q1 2026 saw a more pronounced seasonal decline on the higher productivity associated with the festive period than in Q1 2025.

Read the full Q1 SME Productivity report, and latest monthly workforce reports, here.

About the data behind the Nowcast

Smart Data Foundry works with trusted data partners to responsibly share de-identified financial data for good. This data is used in research, policy making and public service delivery and supports decisions which improve economic wellbeing and reduce poverty and inequality.

The Economic Nowcast is underpinned by a dataset built on around 5 million consumer bank accounts and hundreds of thousands of SMEs. This data is regularly shared by our data partners, prepared and aggregated by our data science team to produce the Nowcast indicators, and is updated monthly to allow comparison with the previous observation.