Author Description

The Family Expenditure Survey (FES) is a survey of a random sample of private households in the UK. It provides information on household expenditure and income. The primary use of the FES is to provide information about spending patterns for the Retail Price Index, although over recent years the uses of the FES have extended. The FES now regularly feeds into estimates of consumers' expenditure in the National Accounts, is used for tax benefit modelling and is an important source of economic and social data for government and other research agencies. The figures in the FES are broken down in a number of ways including expenditure by socio-economic characteristics and region. By income, spending is shown to be largest on leisure goods and services, followed by food and non-alcoholic drink, housing and motoring.