Number of Households

Inclusive of 0.5% year-on-year growth estimated in 2025, the number of households in the United Kingdom forecast to increase at a compound annual rate of 0.6% over the five-year period through 2025, to total over 28.7 million households. The population size, cultural preferences and the stock of available housing all have an effect on the long-term shift in the number of households. Since comparable records began in 1996 the trend in UK household volumes has been one of continual, year-on-year growth; albeit, year to year, the financial position of individuals and net migration has had a bearing on the rate of growth, causing it to accelerate or otherwise decelerate in accordance with a shift in economic and socio-economic factors. Nevertheless, the continued expansion in the number of UK households can, for the most part, be attributed to the growth of overall UK population and cohabitating couple families.

Estimated by the ONS to be just shy of 67.1 million in mid-2020, the UK population has continued to grow unabated in recent history. Continual population growth has been largely due to a trended increase, albeit deceleration, in life expectancy as a result of improved health awareness and medical innovations, resulting in better health and better health practices among society and, ultimately, helping people to live for longer compared to previous generations. As per ONS data, published in September 2021, the life expectancy at birth in the United Kingdom in 2018 to 2020 was 79 years for males and 82.9 years for females; while this represented a fall of 7.0 weeks for males – the first decline when comparing non-overlapping time periods since series records began in the early-1980s - and almost no change (+0.5 weeks) for females, relative to the latest non-overlapping period (2015 to 2017), the ONS notes that ‘the coronavirus pandemic led to a greater number of deaths than normal in 2020…These estimates rely on the assumption that current levels of mortality, which are unusually high, will continue…Once the coronavirus pandemic has ended and its future mortality are known, it is possible that life expectancy will return to an improving trend in the future’.