Estimates of how the coronavirus (COVID-19) has impacted income and affordability in Great Britain. Data are from the Survey on Living Conditions (SLC).

This project investigated the roles of the welfare state, education, reductions in family size, and improvements in real wages in the elimination of poverty in Britain, 1904-54. The key national data sets for this analysis are household expenditure surveys for 1904, 1937/8 and 1953/4. The 1953/4 survey is the largest of the twentieth century (12,900 households) and survives in its entirety at The National Archives. It was carried out before the affluence of the Golden Age had been widely distributed. Abel-Smith and Townsend used some of this survey for their The Poor and the Poorest (1965), which was influential in setting the social policy agenda of the 1960s. The project digitised the 1953/4 survey and exploited these early twentieth century surveys to analyse poverty, nutrition and overcrowding among working households in Britain. A web-based centre on living standards provides information on the changing economic circumstances of households. It also allows access to the data, which have a number of other important long-term potential uses for social research.

The Poverty and Social Exclusion Living Standards Survey provided crucial information about the living standards experienced by UK households, with particular interest in issues of income inequality, poverty and social exclusion. Survey fieldwork was conducted separately in Great Britain (England, Scotland, Wales) and Northern Ireland. In Great Britain the study was conducted by the NatCen Social Research on behalf of the University of Bristol. In Northern Ireland the study was conducted by Central Survey Unit (CSU) of the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) on behalf of Queen's University Belfast.

This is a quantitative data collection. This study aimed to collect comprehensive information on all forms of resources (including income and assets) and indicative information on deprivation and style of living in order to define and measure poverty among a representative sample of the population of the United Kingdom. This major study was the result of fifteen years research. In 1964 the Joseph Rowntree Memorial Trust agreed to finance pilot studies on fatherless families, large families and unemployed and disabled people which were then to be followed by a national survey of poverty. In 1967-68, following pilot work, interviews were completed with 2,052 households (6,045 people), in 630 parliamentary constituencies throughout the United Kingdom. Another 1,514 households (3,539 people), were later interviewed in a poor area of Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales to secure information about the populations of the poorest areas. There were mixed reactions to the book’s publication in 1979. The concept of relative deprivation provoked much discussion but the issue of multiple deprivation experienced by individuals and families was largely ignored. Comparatively little attention was paid to certain forms of deprivation - such as deprivation at work and environmental or locational deprivation - although the report gave data about multiple deprivation drawn from 60 indicators. Nearly 50 years later this study was reanalysed in a project funded by Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The ‘Advancing Paradata’ project looked at shifts and continuities in the social process of gathering household survey data about poverty. In part it does this through analysis of survey paradata from the 1968 Poverty in the UK survey. Paradata captures the gamut of by-products of the collection of survey data and is of interest in understanding and improving survey quality and costs. The main focus has been on automatically captured macro items, but this is now expanding to include interviewer-generated observations. For the ‘Advancing Paradata’ project, information available only on paper questionnaires at the UK Data Archive was converted into digitised form and related metadata was created. A sample of 100 survey booklets has been selected for this collection. These booklets were chosen because they have significant quantities of marginalia written on the booklets. These booklets are available via the UK Data Service QualiBank, an online tool for browsing, searching and citing the content of selected qualitative data collections held at the UK Data Service. Names of survey respondents have been removed to protect confidentiality.

Real household disposable income per person in the United Kingdom is expected to grow by 2.6 percent in 2024/25, with disposable income growth slowing from that point onwards. In 2022/23, disposable income fell by two percent, after falling by 0.1 percent in 2021/22, and 0.3 percent in 2020/21.

Abstract

In 1992, Bosnia-Herzegovina, one of the six republics in former Yugoslavia, became an independent nation. A civil war started soon thereafter, lasting until 1995 and causing widespread destruction and losses of lives. Following the Dayton accord, BosniaHerzegovina (BiH) emerged as an independent state comprised of two entities, namely, the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (FBiH) and the Republika Srpska (RS), and the district of Brcko. In addition to the destruction caused to the physical infrastructure, there was considerable social disruption and decline in living standards for a large section of the population. Along side these events, a period of economic transition to a market economy was occurring. The distributive impacts of this transition, both positive and negative, are unknown. In short, while it is clear that welfare levels have changed, there is very little information on poverty and social indicators on which to base policies and programs.

In the post-war process of rebuilding the economic and social base of the country, the government has faced the problems created by having little relevant data at the household level. The three statistical organizations in the country (State Agency for Statistics for BiH –BHAS, the RS Institute of Statistics-RSIS, and the FBiH Institute of Statistics-FIS) have been active in working to improve the data available to policy makers: both at the macro and the household level. One facet of their activities is to design and implement a series of household series. The first of these surveys is the Living Standards Measurement Study survey (LSMS). Later surveys will include the Household Budget Survey (an Income and Expenditure Survey) and a Labor Force Survey. A subset of the LSMS households will be re-interviewed in the two years following the LSMS to create a panel data set.

The three statistical organizations began work on the design of the Living Standards Measurement Study Survey (LSMS) in 1999. The purpose of the survey was to collect data needed for assessing the living standards of the population and for providing the key indicators needed for social and economic policy formulation. The survey was to provide data at the country and the entity level and to allow valid comparisons between entities to be made.

The LSMS survey was carried out in the Fall of 2001 by the three statistical organizations with financial and technical support from the Department for International Development of the British Government (DfID), United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the Japanese Government, and the World Bank (WB). The creation of a Master Sample for the survey was supported by the Swedish Government through SIDA, the European Commission, the Department for International Development of the British Government and the World Bank.

The overall management of the project was carried out by the Steering Board, comprised of the Directors of the RS and FBiH Statistical Institutes, the Management Board of the State Agency for Statistics and representatives from DfID, UNDP and the WB. The day-to-day project activities were carried out by the Survey Mangement Team, made up of two professionals from each of the three statistical organizations.

The Living Standard Measurement Survey LSMS, in addition to collecting the information necessary to obtain a comprehensive as possible measure of the basic dimensions of household living standards, has three basic objectives, as follows:

1. To provide the public sector, government, the business community, scientific institutions, international donor organizations and social organizations with information on different indicators of the population’s living conditions, as well as on available resources for satisfying basic needs.

2. To provide information for the evaluation of the results of different forms of government policy and programs developed with the aim to improve the population’s living standard. The survey will enable the analysis of the relations between and among different aspects of living standards (housing, consumption, education, health, labor) at a given time, as well as within a household.

3. To provide key contributions for development of government’s Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper, based on analyzed data.

Geographic coverage

National coverage. Domains: Urban/rural/mixed; Federation; Republic

Kind of data

Sample survey data [ssd]

Sampling procedure

A total sample of 5,400 households was determined to be adequate for the needs of the survey: with 2,400 in the Republika Srpska and 3,000 in the Federation of BiH. The difficulty was in selecting a probability sample that would be representative of the country's population. The sample design for any survey depends upon the availability of information on the universe of households and individuals in the country. Usually this comes from a census or administrative records. In the case of BiH the most recent census was done in 1991. The data from this census were rendered obsolete due to both the simple passage of time but, more importantly, due to the massive population displacements that occurred during the war.

At the initial stages of this project it was decided that a master sample should be constructed. Experts from Statistics Sweden developed the plan for the master sample and provided the procedures for its construction. From this master sample, the households for the LSMS were selected.

Master Sample [This section is based on Peter Lynn's note "LSMS Sample Design and Weighting - Summary". April, 2002. Essex University, commissioned by DfID.]

The master sample is based on a selection of municipalities and a full enumeration of the selected municipalities. Optimally, one would prefer smaller units (geographic or administrative) than municipalities. However, while it was considered that the population estimates of municipalities were reasonably accurate, this was not the case for smaller geographic or administrative areas. To avoid the error involved in sampling smaller areas with very uncertain population estimates, municipalities were used as the base unit for the master sample.

The Statistics Sweden team proposed two options based on this same method, with the only difference being in the number of municipalities included and enumerated. For reasons of funding, the smaller option proposed by the team was used, or Option B.

Stratification of Municipalities

The first step in creating the Master Sample was to group the 146 municipalities in the country into three strata- Urban, Rural and Mixed - within each of the two entities. Urban municipalities are those where 65 percent or more of the households are considered to be urban, and rural municipalities are those where the proportion of urban households is below 35 percent. The remaining municipalities were classified as Mixed (Urban and Rural) Municipalities. Brcko was excluded from the sampling frame.

Urban, Rural and Mixed Municipalities: It is worth noting that the urban-rural definitions used in BiH are unusual with such large administrative units as municipalities classified as if they were completely homogeneous. Their classification into urban, rural, mixed comes from the 1991 Census which used the predominant type of income of households in the municipality to define the municipality. This definition is imperfect in two ways. First, the distribution of income sources may have changed dramatically from the pre-war times: populations have shifted, large industries have closed and much agricultural land remains unusable due to the presence of land mines. Second, the definition is not comparable to other countries' where villages, towns and cities are classified by population size into rural or urban or by types of services and infrastructure available. Clearly, the types of communities within a municipality vary substantially in terms of both population and infrastructure.

However, these imperfections are not detrimental to the sample design (the urban/rural definition may not be very useful for analysis purposes, but that is a separate issue). [Note: It may be noted that the percent of LSMS households in each stratum reporting using agricultural land or having livestock is highest in the "rural" municipalities and lowest in the "urban" municipalities. However, the concentration of agricultural households is higher in RS, so the municipality types are not comparable across entities. The percent reporting no land or livestock in RS was 74.7% in "urban" municipalities, 43.4% in "mixed" municipalities and 31.2% in "rural" municipalities. Respective figures for FbiH were 88.7%, 60.4% and 40.0%.]

The classification is used simply for stratification. The stratification is likely to have some small impact on the variance of survey estimates, but it does not introduce any bias.

Selection of Municipalities

Option B of the Master Sample involved sampling municipalities independently from each of the six strata described in the previous section. Municipalities were selected with probability proportional to estimated population size (PPES) within each stratum, so as to select approximately 50% of the mostly urban municipalities, 20% of the mixed and 10% of the mostly rural ones. Overall, 25 municipalities were selected (out of 146) with 14 in the FbiH and 11 in the RS. The distribution of selected municipalities over the sampling strata is shown below.

Stratum / Total municipalities Mi / Sampled municipalities mi 1. Federation, mostly urban / 10 / 5 2. Federation, mostly mixed / 26 / 4 3. Federation, mostly rural / 48 / 5 4. RS, mostly urban /4 / 2 5. RS, mostly mixed /29 / 5 6. RS, mostly rural / 29 / 4

Note: Mi is the total number of municipalities in stratum i (i=1, … , 6); mi is the number of municipalities selected from stratum

In 2024, gross domestic product per capita in the United Kingdom was 40,172 British pounds, compared with 40,162 pounds in the previous year. In general, while GDP per capita has grown quite consistently throughout this period, there are noticeable declines, especially between 2007 and 2009, and between 2019 and 2020, due to the Global Financial Crisis, and COVID-19 pandemic, respectively. Why is GDP per capita stagnating when the economy is growing? During the last two years that GDP per capita fell and then stagnated in the UK, the overall economy grew by 0.4 percent in 2023 and 1.1 percent in 2024. While the overall UK economy is therefore larger than it was in 2022, the UK's population has grown at a faster rate, resulting in the lower GDP per capita figure. The long-term slump in the UK's productivity, as measured by output per hour worked, has meant that the gap between GDP growth and GDP per capita growth has been widening for some time. Economy remains the main concern of UK voters As of February 2025, the economy was seen as the main issue facing the UK, just ahead of immigration, health, and several other problems in the country. While Brexit was seen as the most important issue before COVID-19, and concerns about health were dominant throughout 2020 and 2021, the economy has generally been the primary facing voters issue since 2022. The surge in inflation throughout 2022 and 2023, and the impact this had on wages and living standards, resulted in a very tough period for UK households. As of January 2025, 57 percent of households were still noticing rising living costs, although this is down from a peak of 91 percent in August 2022.

The Poverty and Social Exclusion in the United Kingdom project is the largest research project of its kind ever carried out in the UK. It examines levels of deprivation in the UK today. The research aims to answer the following questions:

• What are the best methods for measuring poverty, deprivation, social exclusion and standard of living?
• How are the different dimensions of poverty, deprivation and social exclusion related?
• What is the current extent and nature of poverty and how has it changed?
• What policies best address these problems?

• Firstly, two major surveys into the public's perceptions of necessities and into living standards were carried out in 2012/13: an attitudinal UK Omnibus survey, gathering the public's perceptions of necessities and attitudes to services (held under SN 7878); and a large-scale survey of living standards to examine the nature, extent and causes of deprivation and social exclusion (SN 7879).
• In addition, two qualitative research studies have been undertaken: an investigation into the experiences of living on low income during recession in Gloucestershire, the West Midlands and Strathclyde (SN 7877); and an exploration of the role of the family when coping with poverty in Northern Ireland.

Abstract

Starting June 1999, after the intervention of NATO in the conflict between Kosovo and Serbia (FRY), the United Nations provided interim administration for the province. The consequences of the conflict on the living standards of the population were severe, with the collapse of the industrial sector, the paralysis of agriculture, and extensive damage to private housing, education and health facilities and other infrastructure. In addition, the conflict brought massive population displacement both within Kosovo and abroad.

A year later, Kosovo was in a process of transition from emergency relief to long-term economic development. The purpose of the survey was to provide crucial information for policy and program design for use by the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), international donors, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and the Kosovar community at large for poverty alleviation and inequality reduction.

During the same period, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) was planning an agriculture and livestock survey. It was decided to join both surveys, in order to pool resources and provide better assistance to the newly re-formed Statistical Office of Kosovo (SOK) and to take into account the extensive Kosovar peasant household economy. Therefore the agriculture and food aid modules are more developed than those of a standard LSMS survey.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) also was interested in information related to labor force and employment. They had run a socio-demographic and reproductive health survey with the United Nations Population Fund, covering approximately 10,000 households at the end of 1999. IOM provided the urban sampling frame for the present survey.

Geographic coverage

Kosovo. Domains: Urban/rural; Area of Responsibility (American, British, French, German, Italian); Serbian minority

Analysis unit

• Households
• Individuals
• Community

Kind of data

Sample survey data [ssd]

Sampling procedure

SAMPLE DESIGN

The sample design used in the Kosovo LSMS 2000 had to contend with the fact that the last census, conducted in 1991, was rendered obsolete by the boycott of the Albanian population and by the massive displacements since March 1998. A Housing Damage Assessment Survey (HDAS) was conducted in February 1999 and updated in June 1999 by the International Management Group (IMG) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the rural areas. The survey covered 95 percent of the Albanian rural areas and provided the basis for the rural sampling frame, after updating. The updating and household listings in selected villages were conducted by FAO.

Since the HDAS did not cover Serbian villages, a quick counting4 of housing units was performed in these villages, following a procedure similar to the one in the urban areas. In urban areas, the original plan was to use the information from the on-going individual voters’ registration conducted by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Since the registration was limited to individuals above 16 years old, it was then decided to conduct a quick counting of households in the 22 urban areas. The quick counting and subsequent listing of households was performed by IOM, under the supervision of the sampling expert hired by the World Bank. . FRAMEWORK

UNMIK divided Kosovo into 5 areas of responsibility (AR), roughly equivalent to the former regions (American – Southeast, British – East including Pristina, French – North, German-South, Italian – West). The rural frame used the IMG/UNHCR Housing Damage Assessment Survey. It was updated with the collaboration of FAO and provided much better information on which to build the sample for the survey. Aerial pictures of the villages selected in the survey were used to help identifying housing units. Only one household was interviewed in each housing unit. For the Serbian villages, counting households and making listings had to be elaborated by the survey team.

In urban areas, IOM contracted the quick counting to SOK in the Albanian cities and to firms in the Serb areas. These firms updated existing lists, or performed some quick counting. Using the updated information IOM created enumeration areas of size 150-200 housing units. Based on this quick counting, a full listing took place in all the selected EAs and 12 households were randomly selected. Given safety issues and quality problems discovered at the enumeration stage, the Serb urban listings were revised after the end of the survey, by the Serb survey team, who had performed the rural listings.

The sample was preset at 2,880 households in order to allow analyses in the following breakdowns: (a) Kosovo as a whole; (b) by area of responsibility, (c) by urban/rural locations. In addition, the survey data can be used to derive separate estimates for the Serbian minority.

In the rural area, 30 Albanian villages were randomly selected in each AR and a listing of all households in the village was established.5 In each village, 12 households were then randomly selected (8 for interviewing and 4 reserve households). Similarly, 30 urban enumeration areas (between 150 and 200 households lie in each urban EA) were randomly selected in the Albanian part of each AR. Twelve households were then selected in each EA. In the rural area, 30 Serb villages were selected from the three municipalities in the northern part of Kosovo, the enclaves and the municipality of Strepce. Thirty urban EA were selected in the same region. In each village and urban area, 12 households were then randomly selected.

STRATIFICATION

In addition to the explicit stratification of the areas of responsibility and the ethnic composition in each rural and urban category, an implicit stratification of geographic ordering in a serpentine method in the villages and urban enumeration areas was followed. In order to be able to provide estimates for the separate domains described above, it was recommended that 240 households be interviewed in each domain. We had very little prior knowledge of response rates. In the rural villages, it was decided to select 12 households and identify 4 of them as “reserve households”. These reserve households were to be used only in specific cases, described at length to the logistics person/driver of the interviewing team. The final sample size was 1,200 rural and urban Albanian households and 240 rural and urban Serb households, for a total sample size of 2,880 households.

Mode of data collection

Face-to-face [f2f]

Research instrument

Two questionnaires were used to collect the information: a household questionnaire and a community questionnaire. No anthropometric information was collected as malnutrition problems, facing Kosovar children and women, would not be detected by these procedures.

Since FAO and SOK were conducting a price survey in 7 cities of Kosovo, on a monthly basis, it was decided to not include a separate price questionnaire but use the data from the FAO-SOK price survey. The Kosovo LSMS 2000 collected information using a household questionnaire, which was based in part on the standard LSMS questionnaire developed in Grosh and Glewwe (2000).

The standard questionnaire was adapted to the specifics of the Kosovar environment and special modules about displacement, food aid and social protection were added. Individual modules were administered as much as possible to most informed respondents. Box 1 contains a summary of the content of the questionnaire.

The community questionnaire was designed to collect information on community-level infrastructure, with a special emphasis on school and health facilities as well as displaced persons issues. Box 2 contains a summary of the content of the community questionnaire. [Note: Community is defined as the Primary Sampling Unit (PSU) of the survey. In rural areas, it generally encompasses villages unless these are less than 50 households (in which case, they were grouped with a neighboring village) or more than 200 households (in which case, they were broken-up in PSUs of 50-200 households). In urban areas, community is defined as the Enumeration Area but includes the larger city when referring to secondary school and university, hospitals and factories.]

Response rate

Households from the original sample selection which could not be interviewed were replaced by reserve households to reach the final sample size. The non-response rate among households originally selected for inclusion in the sample in rural Albanian areas was 11.8 percent and 20.8 percent in urban Albanian areas. These rates in the Serbian areas were 14.2 percent among rural households and 39.2 percent among urban households.

In the rural Albanian areas, non-response came mostly from households having moved outside of the village. A few refusals were due to the fact that households were in mourning or celebrating other religious occasions (wedding, baptisms, circumcisions, etc…), or the household head was a women alone. There were only 20 actual refusals of the originally selected households, only 2 percent of the 1,200 households originally contacted.

In the Serbian rural areas, half of the non-responses were due to households having traveled to Serbia for visits (holidays, health care issues, indefinite travel….). Other reasons included: interviewer’s safety (houses too isolated) and households refusing to respond in the absence of the head. There were only 5 such cases, again only 2 percent of the 240 households originally contacted. In the urban areas, 10 percent of the non-responses were linked to listings problems (non-existent addresses).

The Small Fortunes Survey is the first ever nationally representative survey of the lifestyles and living standards of British children. Taking the child as the unit of analysis, its main aims were :
to establish household expenditure on children and to investigate variation by income, age and gender of child and by family size and status;
to estimate certain of the indirect costs imposed by child rearing;
to determine the nature and extent of extra household support for children;
to specify and compare, the minimum direct costs of children according to budget standard, consensual, self-assessment and behavioural definitions;
to examine the nature and degree of poverty in childhood according to those definitions given above;
to investigate the 'economics of parenting': the extent to which children's aspirations are met at the expense of the living standards of parents; parent/child interactions on finance; parents' economic aspirations for their children;
to explore childhood living standards from children's own perspectives, investigating their experience of money and its management; knowledge and understanding of the family's financial circumstances in the context of the immediate neighbourhood and wider society.

The VHLSS aims to monitor living standards, the effectiveness of government strategy, and socio-economic development goals in Vietnam. The sample size in 2022 included almost 47,000 households from across Vietnam. Household heads, household members, and key commune officials were interviewed. The study was known as the Vietnam Living Standards Survey (VLSS) for the two initial surveys in 1993 and 1998. In 2002, changes were made to the format of the study, and it was renamed as VHLSS. From 2002 to 2010, VHLSS was conducted every two years. Since 2011, VHLSS has been conducted annually.

The TLSS was part of the World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) and aimed to understand the welfare of Tajik individuals and households. Cross-sectional TLSSs were conducted on households in Tajikistan in 1999, 2003, and 2007. Of the 4,860 households surveyed in 2007, 1,500 of these were followed up in 2009.

The Households Below Average Income (HBAI) data presents information on living standards in the UK based on household income measures for the financial year.

HBAI uses equivalised disposable household income as a proxy for living standards in order to allow comparisons of the living standards of different types of households (that is, income is adjusted to take into account variations in the size and composition of the households in a process known as equivalisation). A key assumption made in HBAI is that all individuals in the household benefit equally from the combined income of the household. This enables the total equivalised income of the household to be used as a proxy for the standard of living of each household member.

In line with international best practice, the income measures used in HBAI are subject to several statistical adjustments and, as such, are not always directly relatable to income amounts as they might be understood by people on a day-to-day basis. These adjustments, however, allow consistent comparison over time and across households of different sizes and compositions. HBAI uses variants of CPI inflation when estimating how incomes are changing in real terms over time.

The main data source used in this study is the Family Resources Survey (FRS), a continuous cross-sectional survey. The FRS normally has a sample of 19,000 - 20,000 UK households. The use of survey data means that HBAI estimates are subject to uncertainty, which can affect how changes should be interpreted, especially in the short term. Analysis of geographies below the regional level is not recommended from this data.

Further information and the latest publication can be found on the gov.uk HBAI webpage. The HBAI team want to provide user-friendly datasets and clearer documentation, so please contact team.hbai@dwp.gov.uk if you have any suggestions or feedback on the new harmonised datasets and documentation.

An earlier HBAI study, Institute for Fiscal Studies Households Below Average Income Dataset, 1961-1991, is held under SN 3300.

Latest Edition Information

For the 19th edition (April 2025), resamples data have been added to the study alongside supporting documentation. Main data back to 1994/95 have been updated to latest-year prices, and the documentation has been updated accordingly.

Using the HBAI files

Users should note that either 7-Zip or a recent version of WinZip is needed to unzip the HBAI download zip files, due to their size. The inbuilt Windows compression software will not handle them correctly.

Labelling of variables
Users should note that many variables across the resamples files do not include full variable or value labels. This information can be found easily in the documentation - see the Harmonised Data Variables Guide.

HBAI versions

The HBAI datasets are available in two versions at the UKDS:

1. End User Licence (EUL) (Anonymised) Datasets:

These datasets contain no names, addresses, telephone numbers, bank account details, NINOs or any personal details that can be considered disclosive under the terms of the ONS Disclosure Control guidance. Changes made to the datasets are as follows:

• All ages above 80 are instead top-coded to 80 years of age.
• The variable for the amount of Council Tax liability for the household and pensioner flags for the head and spouse have been removed.
• All amount variables have been rounded to the nearest £1.
• A very small number of large households (with 10 or more individuals) have been removed from the dataset.

2. Secure Access Datasets:

Secure Access datasets for HBAI are held under SN 7196. The Secure Access data are not subject to the same edits as the EUL version and are, therefore, more disclosive and subject to strict access conditions. They are currently only available to UK HE/FE applicants. Prospective users of the Secure Access version of the HBAI must fulfil additional requirements beyond those associated with the EUL datasets.

According to a survey conducted in June 2025, 52 percent of respondents in Great Britain thought that living conditions at prisons were too easy, compared with 17 percent who believed they were about right, and eight percent who thought they were too harsh.

HBAI provides information on potential living standards in the UK as determined by net disposable income (equivalised). HBAI enables the analysis of changes in income patterns over time.

Latest edition information

For the 15th edition (April 2025), resamples data have been added to the study alongside supporting documentation. Main data back to 1994/95 have been updated to latest-year prices, and the documentation has been updated accordingly.

Users should note that the Secure Access versions of the Family Resources Survey and Pensioners' Incomes statistics data, previously held together with HBAI, have been moved to SNs 9256 and 9257, respectively. Users should note that some documentation may still refer to 'Safe Room' rather than 'Secure Access'.

In the first quarter of 2025, ** percent of people in the East of England were on track for at least Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association (PLSA) minimum retirement living standards. That made the East of England the region in the United Kingdom with the highest share of people on track. In contrast, Northern Ireland and North-East England were the regions with the lowest share of people on track for the minimum retirement standards, with only ** percent of people on track.

The purpose of this study, compiled by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), was to provide a consistent description of household incomes and characteristics between 1961-1991, enabling a comprehensive analysis of the trend in poverty, inequality and real living standards in the UK over the last thirty years. The study was extended in 2020 to include data from 1992 and 1993. The Households Below Average Income (HBAI) data are compiled from the Family Expenditure Survey (FES) (held at the UKDA under GN 33057), in this case from 1961-1993.

Households Below Average Income data, with coverage from 1994-1995 onwards, are held at the UKDA under GN 33383. Data and documentation from the HBAI series is also available from the Department for Work and Pensions' "http://www.dwp.gov.uk/asd/hbai/hbai2006/contents.asp" title="Households Below Average Income" style=""> Households Below Average Income web page.

For the second edition (February 2020), data files for 1992 and 1993 were added. The original data and documentation were also updated to the latest file formats.