British Pound (GBP) Data Coverage: Indicators, Sources and Release Times

Quick answer

FXMacroData serves 34 pound sterling series from the production catalogue, published by the Bank of England (BoE), the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and, for the trade-weighted index, the Bank for International Settlements. They cover Bank Rate, SONIA, the gilt curve from 1 to 40 years, the 10-year real yield, CPI, core CPI and PPI, GDP, retail sales, the labour market and wages, trade, the current account, money supply and an ONS household savings-expectations measure.

For GBP/USD and EUR/GBP the key events are Monetary Policy Committee decisions, CPI and the monthly labour market release with its wage data. Each release is stored with its exact announcement timestamp.

This guide sets out what is in the GBP catalogue, who publishes each series, when it is released in London time and UTC, and how traders use UK data in sterling pairs.

Who publishes pound sterling data

Bank of England. The BoE's Monetary Policy Committee sets Bank Rate at eight scheduled meetings a year. The BoE also publishes SONIA, the UK government nominal and real yield curves, and the monetary aggregates from its Bankstats database. FXMacroData reads these from the BoE's statistical database and yield-curve files.

Office for National Statistics. The ONS publishes CPI and core CPI, producer prices, GDP, retail sales, the labour market statistics including average weekly earnings, trade, the current account and the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey used for the household expectations series.

Bank for International Settlements. The GBP trade-weighted index is the BIS nominal effective exchange rate (broad basket, 2020=100), not the Bank of England's sterling effective exchange rate index.

New releases typically reach the API within seconds of official publication; see release speed for measured timings.

GBP indicators covered

Every series below is listed at /v1/data_catalogue/gbp. The slug in brackets is the indicator value used in API calls.

Policy and rates

• Bank Rate (policy_rate): one row per MPC decision, holds included, from 1975. The MPC's vote split is often as market-moving as the decision itself.
• SONIA (risk_free_rate): the daily Sterling Overnight Index Average, the benchmark for sterling overnight funding.
• UK government yield curve (1-year, 2-year, 3-year, 4-year, 5-year, 7-year, 10-year, 20-year, 30-year, 40-year): daily points from the Bank of England's nominal government curve. The 2-year is the most sensitive to MPC expectations; the 30-year and 40-year carry the fiscal and pension-demand risk that has driven several sterling sell-offs.
• 10-year real yield (inflation_linked_bond): the BoE's 10-year real (index-linked) gilt zero-coupon yield, daily.

Inflation

• CPI inflation (inflation): headline year-on-year CPI, the measure the BoE targets at 2 percent.
• Core CPI (core_inflation): CPI excluding energy, food, alcohol and tobacco.
• Producer Price Index (ppi): year-on-year output prices of manufactured products, released with CPI.

Growth and activity

• GDP (gdp): quarterly GDP in GBP billion from the ONS national accounts.
• Retail sales (retail_sales): year-on-year change in retail sales volumes.
• Household saving expectations (consumer_confidence): the ONS Opinions and Lifestyle Survey net balance of adults who expect to be able to save over the next year, normalised to a 0 to 100 scale. The UK has no official consumer confidence index, so this official single-question measure stands in for one. It is not the GfK barometer, it is not comparable in level with other countries' consumer confidence series, and it has a gap from July 2023 to March 2024 when the question was dropped.

Labour market

• Unemployment rate (unemployment): the ILO rate from the Labour Force Survey, on the ONS's rolling three-month basis.
• Employment (employment, full-time, part-time, participation rate): employment levels and the share of the population that is economically active.
• Average weekly earnings (wages): year-on-year growth in average weekly earnings. Wage growth is the MPC's main lens on domestic inflation persistence, so this number often moves sterling more than the unemployment rate.

External accounts

• Trade (trade balance, exports, imports): monthly UK trade in GBP million.
• Current account balance (current_account_balance): quarterly. The UK runs a persistent current account deficit, which makes sterling reliant on foreign capital inflows.
• Trade-weighted index (BIS NEER) (trade_weighted_index): monthly nominal effective exchange rate of sterling.

Money and credit

• Money supply (M1, M2, M3, M4 broad money): monthly Bank of England aggregates in GBP million. M4 is the BoE's headline broad money measure.

GBP release timing

ONS releases are at 07:00 UK time, before the London FX open is fully under way, and MPC decisions at 12:00. The UK (Europe/London) uses British Summer Time from the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October, so the UTC column shows BST (UTC+1) first and GMT (UTC+0) second.

The labour market release and CPI usually fall on consecutive days in the same week, which concentrates sterling event risk. The release calendar lists upcoming dates, and MPC statements appear in the GBP press release feed.

Worked example: the August 2026 CPI

The ONS published the August 2026 CPI on Wednesday 16 September 2026 at 07:00 London time, the day before the September MPC decision. This request returns it:

curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY" "https://api.fxmacrodata.com/v1/announcements/gbp/inflation?start_date=2026-09-01"

The newest row in the response (abridged to the core fields):

{
  "date": "2026-08-31",
  "val": 3.1,
  "announcement_datetime": 1789538400,
  "previous_value": 2.9,
  "previous_date": "2026-07-31"
}

val is CPI inflation of 3.1 percent year on year for August, up from 2.9 percent in July, and announcement_datetime 1789538400 is 06:00:00 UTC, which is 07:00 BST. With inflation above the 2 percent target and rising one day before an MPC meeting, the release was a direct input into how GBP/USD priced the next day's decision.

How traders use GBP data

CPI, services and the MPC

The MPC targets 2 percent CPI inflation. Track headline and core CPI against Bank Rate; when core stays well above target, markets push back expected cuts and sterling tends to firm against currencies whose central banks are easing.

Wages as the persistence signal

Average weekly earnings growth far above productivity growth keeps the MPC cautious. A strong wage print in the labour market release often matters more for GBP/USD than the unemployment rate published alongside it.

Short-end spreads

The UK 2-year yield minus the US 2-year (for GBP/USD) or the euro area 2-year (for EUR/GBP) is the core rate signal. SONIA shows how Bank Rate is transmitting to overnight markets.

Long-end and fiscal risk

The 30-year and 40-year gilt yields respond to fiscal news and pension-fund demand. Episodes where long yields jump while sterling falls point to a risk premium on UK assets rather than a hawkish rate story, and call for a different trade.

Current account funding

The UK's current account deficit needs steady capital inflows. In risk-off periods a wide deficit leaves sterling more exposed; the quarterly current account and the BIS trade-weighted index help size that vulnerability.

Related pages

• Bank of England: key indicators and API data guide
• GBP/USD dashboard
• EUR/GBP dashboard
• Release calendar
• GBP press releases
• FXMacroData data coverage across all 22 currencies