The Office for National Statistics put public sector net debt at £2,989.9bn at the end of June 2026, equal to 94.9% of everything the economy produces in a year 1. The ONS publishes this figure monthly as the UK's national statistics institute. Net debt means what the state owes after subtracting the liquid assets it holds, which is the UK's own measure rather than the one the International Monetary Fund uses for cross-country comparison. Hold on to the 95% framing: for every £1 the economy makes in a year, the state owes about 95p.
Divide that across roughly 28.4 million households and it comes to about £105,000 each. That is our arithmetic on the published total, not a figure the ONS prints, and it is the sort of number that travels further than it deserves.
The vintage matters as much as the level. The ONS had first reported end-May net debt at about £2,984bn, then cut it by £8.3bn to £2,976.0bn after a Bank of England data update 2. A total this large moves by billions on a routine correction, so a headline built on a first print can be stale within a month. June borrowing, meanwhile, came in at £16.0bn against the £16.3bn the Office for Budget Responsibility, the government's independent forecaster, had pencilled in back in March 3. Borrowing slightly less than the forecaster expected is the quiet result buried under the debt headline.
Central government paid £11.8bn in debt interest in June alone and £33.3bn across April to June, down 31.0% on the same month a year earlier and still the fourth-highest June on record before adjusting for inflation 4. The ONS attributes that volatility specifically to index-linked gilts, government loans whose payments rise automatically with inflation. Two different numbers get confused here constantly: new issuance is now about 10% index-linked, down from about 25% a decade ago 5, but the outstanding stock carries a far larger share and shifts far more slowly. The flow has been de-risked. The exposure has not.
Lenders, meanwhile, keep turning up to the auctions. The Debt Management Office offered £4,250m of a gilt maturing in 2036 on 16 July 2026 and received £13,299.5m of bids, a bid-to-cover ratio of 3.13x at a yield of about 5.04% 6. Bid-to-cover is money bid divided by money on sale, and roughly three pounds chased every pound available. Britain pays more to borrow than it did five years ago, and still finds three times the money it needs at auction.
