How much of Britain's retail spending is online now
Retail data study
Just over a quarter of retail spending in Great Britain now goes through online checkouts: far above the level before the pandemic, well below the lockdown peak, and a little higher than a year ago.
Every autumn, retailers argue about the same thing. How many of this season's orders will leave in a delivery van, and how many will leave a shop in a carrier bag? The answer shapes staffing rotas, stock splits and marketing budgets for the busiest weeks of the year.
Two stories usually fill the gap. The first says the pandemic tipped Britain online for good and the shift has kept going ever since. The second says shoppers drifted back to the high street once the doors reopened, and online has gone flat. The Office for National Statistics publishes a monthly figure that lets anyone check both.
In August 2026, online sales made up 27.3% of retail sales by value in Great Britain, roughly one pound in every four. The figure counts internet sales by every kind of retailer. A supermarket's delivery orders and a department store's website sit alongside the online-only sellers. The ONS also revises recent months as fuller returns arrive, so the latest reading can shift slightly in later releases.
The lockdown record is still a long way off
Start with the first story: the idea that the pandemic jump simply carried on. The online share peaked at 37.8% in January 2021, the highest of all the months recorded in the ONS series.
Today's share sits well beneath that mark. The extreme lockdown level did not become the new normal. Whatever pulled spending online in those months, a good part of it went back to the tills once shops could trade freely again.
Shoppers never returned to 2019 habits
The second story fares no better. In August 2019, before the pandemic, online accounted for 18.1% of retail sales. This August's share is more than nine percentage points higher than that.
That is a large, lasting change in where money is spent. The parcel on the doorstep is a much bigger part of the weekly spend than it was before the pandemic.
A modest step up on last August
That leaves the question that matters most for planning: is the online share higher than a year ago?
On that like-for-like basis, the answer is yes, slowly. A year earlier, in August 2025, online took 26.1% of retail sales, and the August 2026 reading is 1.2 percentage points higher.
One pair of months is a narrow window, and it says nothing about where the share goes next. It describes a small step, taken at walking pace.
Set side by side, the four readings look like this.
| Month | Online share of retail sales (%) |
|---|---|
| August 2019 (before the pandemic) | 18.1 |
| January 2021 (highest month in the ONS series) | 37.8 |
| August 2025 | 26.1 |
| August 2026 | 27.3 |
A quarter of spending, edging higher
Neither of the familiar stories fits the official numbers. Online did not keep climbing from its lockdown height, and it did not sink back to where it started. It has settled at a level far above the old normal and is still inching up when you compare the same month a year apart.
That is a less dramatic story than either camp tells, and a more useful one. The bulk of retail spending still goes through physical tills. The online slice is big enough that no retailer can treat it as a side channel, and it is moving slowly enough that a sudden lurch in either direction would be out of keeping with the past year.
What this means for UK businesses
For anyone planning the Black Friday and Christmas run-up, a few practical points follow from the figures above.
- Plan for a mixed basket. Most spending still happens in shops, while a sizeable minority happens online. Stock, staffing and fulfilment plans need to serve both at once.
- Set lockdown-era volumes aside as a baseline. The record month was an exception. Forecasting online demand from it will overstate what you need.
- Treat 2019 as a different era. Online is a much larger share of spending than it was before the pandemic, so budgets and targets set back then are likely to undersell your website.
- Expect gradual change. The year-on-year step is small. Steady, incremental investment in your online channel matches what the data shows better than a big bet on a sudden jump.
- Compare like with like. Judge your own online share against the same month last year, and recheck the national figure when the ONS revises it.
So when the van and the carrier bag compete for this autumn's orders, the carrier bag will still carry most of them. The van will take a little more than it did last year.
How we built it
This analysis uses the Office for National Statistics retail sales series J4MC, which measures internet sales by all retailers as a percentage of total retail sales value in Great Britain. It covers online sales by every type of retailer, including those that also trade from shops, not only online-only businesses. The headline approved figures describe these as UK retail; the underlying series covers Great Britain.
We compared like months only: August 2026 against August 2025 and against August 2019, the last August before the pandemic. Comparing the same calendar month across years removes the seasonal pattern in online shopping, such as the run-up to Christmas. We also report the record month, January 2021, the highest of all the months recorded in the series. No forecasts were made, and no rates were calculated beyond the percentage-point differences between the published monthly figures.
Each monthly value is a point-in-time reading from the ONS release, and the ONS revises recent months in later publications, so figures may change slightly. The year-on-year comparison rests on a single pair of months and should be read as a description of that change, not as evidence of a lasting trend.
