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DWP statistics and Stat-Xplore: a guide to benefit data

Stat-Xplore is the Department for Work and Pensions' free online tool for building custom tables from its official statistics on benefits such as Universal Credit, Personal Independence Payment, State Pension and Pension Credit. DWP also publishes bulletins, benefit expenditure and caseload tables, and annual fraud and error estimates on GOV.UK. Fact-checkers use these to test claims about how many people claim a benefit, where they live, and how much the benefit system costs, mostly for Great Britain rather than the whole UK.

Covers: UK · Release calendar

What it publishes

• Universal Credit counts of people, households, claims and starts, with breakdowns by local authority, Parliamentary constituency, age, conditionality regime and employment status, released quarterly since May 2026.
• Personal Independence Payment caseload, new claim registrations and clearances, award outcomes, mandatory reconsiderations and clearance times.
• An Annual DWP Benefits Statistics Compendium covering State Pension, Pension Credit, Attendance Allowance, Carer's Allowance, Disability Living Allowance, Employment and Support Allowance, Housing Benefit and other benefits, with matching datasets on Stat-Xplore.
• Benefit Combinations statistics showing how many people receive one or more DWP benefits at the same time.
• Benefit expenditure and caseload tables giving historic outturn and forecast spending by benefit, usually consistent with the spring and autumn fiscal events.
• Annual estimates of fraud and error in the benefit system, split into overpayments and underpayments and by fraud, claimant error and official error.
• Benefit cap, sanctions, Pension Credit applications and awards, and take-up estimates for income-related benefits.
• Survey-based income statistics, including Households Below Average Income and the Family Resources Survey, some of which are also tabulated in Stat-Xplore.

Key datasets

• Universal Credit statistics
  People, households, claims and starts on Universal Credit in Great Britain from 29 April 2013, with geographic and household breakdowns. Individual months stay available in Stat-Xplore but are now released in quarterly batches.
  Updated: Quarterly (February, May, August, November)
• Personal Independence Payment statistics
  PIP caseload, registrations, clearances, award types, review outcomes and mandatory reconsiderations in Great Britain from 2013. Recipients of Scotland's own disability benefits are not included.
  Updated: Quarterly
• Annual DWP Benefits Statistics Compendium
  Caseloads for State Pension, Pension Credit, Attendance Allowance, Carer's Allowance, DLA, ESA, Housing Benefit and other DWP benefits in Great Britain, with Benefit Combinations. Moved from quarterly to an annual cycle in 2026.
  Updated: Annual (September)
• Benefit expenditure and caseload tables
  Spending and caseload by benefit, with long back series and forecasts that match the Office for Budget Responsibility forecast at each fiscal event. Tables before 2010 sit in the National Archives.
  Updated: Usually twice a year, after fiscal events
• Fraud and error in the benefit system
  Estimated overpayments and underpayments as amounts and as a percentage of benefit expenditure, by benefit and by type of error, for each financial year in Great Britain.
  Updated: Annual (usually May)
• Pension Credit applications and awards
  Weekly counts of Pension Credit claims received, cleared and awarded. Became an annual release from May 2026; caseload figures stay in the benefits compendium.
  Updated: Annual (late May)
• Benefit cap statistics
  Households whose Housing Benefit or Universal Credit is reduced by the benefit cap, by family type and area, in Great Britain.
  Updated: Quarterly
• Income-related benefits: estimates of take-up
  Estimated share of eligible people and of available money claimed for Pension Credit, Housing Benefit and other income-related benefits in Great Britain.
  Updated: Irregular, usually annual
• Households Below Average Income (HBAI)
  UK estimates of the number and share of people in low-income households, before and after housing costs, from the Family Resources Survey.
  Updated: Annual

APIs and downloads

• Stat-Xplore web tool
  Build and download custom tables as Excel, CSV or SDMX. A guest log-in works for browsing; a free account lets you save tables and get an API key.
• Stat-Xplore Open Data API
  JSON REST API at https://stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk/webapi/rest/v1 with /schema, /table, /info and /rate_limit endpoints. Every request needs an APIKey header taken from the Account page; requests without a key return HTTP 401.
• Open Data API table endpoint guide
  Explains how to POST a JSON query naming a database, measures, dimensions and optional recodes (for example a chosen set of regions).
• Open Data API rate limit
  Each key can make up to 2,000 requests per hour. ETag caching is supported and 304 Not Modified responses do not count towards the limit.
• Stat-Xplore help guide
  Official step-by-step guide to tables, filters, downloads, custom groups and Power BI use.
• DWP benefit statistics tools and user guides
  Lists every dataset held in Stat-Xplore and links to dataset-specific user guides, including Universal Credit, HBAI and FRS.
• Universal Credit Stat-Xplore user guide
  Definitions for every Universal Credit field and measure, such as count date, conditionality regime and employment indicator.

When it publishes

DWP statistics are pre-announced on the GOV.UK research and statistics calendar and published at 9:30am. Universal Credit statistics moved from monthly to quarterly releases in February, May, August and November after a 2026 consultation, with the final monthly release on 14 April 2026; provisional estimates were dropped and each quarterly release adds three months of finalised data. The benefits compendium, Benefit Combinations and National Insurance number allocations are now released together once a year. Fraud and error estimates appear each spring, and expenditure tables follow the Budget and spring forecast.

How to use it to check a claim

1. Pin down the unit in the claim. Universal Credit has separate datasets for people, households, claims and starts, and these produce very different totals for the same month.
2. To build a table in Stat-Xplore: log in (guest is fine), click once on a dataset such as People on Universal Credit, then click New Table or open a ready-made table. Drag a field such as Month into columns and a geography into rows, then press Retrieve Data.
3. Use the filter and wafer options to restrict the table to one month, one area or one category, and download as CSV or Excel so the figures can be recorded with the date of extraction.
4. Check the dataset's reference date before comparing. Since May 2026 the Universal Credit claims, starts and people series lag about two months more than before, so the latest month available is earlier than under the old monthly schedule.
5. For spending claims, use the benefit expenditure and caseload tables and note whether a figure is cash or real terms, which geography the table covers, whether it is outturn or forecast, and which fiscal event the tables match.
6. For fraud claims, quote the measure precisely: overpayments due to fraud, overpayments due to all error, or net loss, each as a percentage of expenditure for a named financial year, and look at the confidence intervals in the data tables.
7. Read the 'known issues' text shown next to each dataset in Stat-Xplore and the background note on the compendium page, which record breaks such as the State Pension undercount for November 2024 and February 2025.

Common mistakes

• Counting people on Universal Credit is not the same as counting unemployed people. A large share of claimants are in work, and the conditionality regime field separates those searching for work from those with no work requirements. The ONS claimant count and labour market measures are separate series.
• Universal Credit growth partly reflects people moving across from older benefits such as tax credits, Income Support and income-based Jobseeker's Allowance through managed migration, so a rise in the Universal Credit caseload does not by itself show more people receiving support overall.
• Most DWP caseload statistics cover Great Britain only. Northern Ireland benefits are reported by the Department for Communities, and Scottish recipients of devolved disability and carer benefits, such as Adult Disability Payment, are reported by Social Security Scotland rather than in DWP caseloads.
• Fraud and error estimates come from samples of cases and carry confidence intervals. Lower-spending benefits that are not sampled are given proxy rates, so small year-on-year changes may sit within the margin of uncertainty.
• Expenditure tables mix outturn and forecasts and are revised at each fiscal event, so a figure for a future year can change between editions.
• Stat-Xplore and the expenditure tables apply statistical disclosure control, so breakdowns and totals may not add up exactly. Small gaps between a sum of areas and a published total are expected.

How do I build a table in Stat-Xplore?

Go to stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk and choose the guest log-in or your account. On the home page, click once on a dataset to read its description, then choose New Table or double-click a ready-made table. Drag fields from the left-hand list into the rows and columns, apply filters for the period or area you need, and press Retrieve Data. Download the result as Excel or CSV using the Download Table menu.

Do I need an API key to use Stat-Xplore data?

Not for the website: you can browse and download tables with a guest log-in. The Open Data API does need a free key. Register for an account, log in, open Account from the top-right menu and copy the key shown under Open Data API Access. Send it in an APIKey header with every request. Each key is limited to 2,000 requests an hour, and DWP asks users not to share keys publicly.

Where can I find how many people get State Pension or Pension Credit?

Both caseloads are in the Annual DWP Benefits Statistics Compendium on GOV.UK, with detailed breakdowns in Stat-Xplore under the State Pension and Pension Credit datasets. Since 2026 these are published once a year rather than quarterly. Separate annual statistics on Pension Credit applications and awards show weekly claims received, cleared and awarded, which is useful for checking claims about take-up campaigns.

Why are Universal Credit statistics no longer monthly?

After a public consultation in 2026, DWP moved Universal Credit official statistics to a quarterly cycle. The last monthly release was on 14 April 2026. From May 2026 each quarterly release adds three months of finalised data, provisional estimates were removed and the reference periods of the people, claims, starts and household series were aligned. Monthly data points remain available in Stat-Xplore.

Questions answered using this source

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• How many people claim Housing Benefit?
• What is the poverty line in the UK?
• How many people are on social housing waiting lists?
• How do I make a Freedom of Information request?
• How many people are saving into a workplace pension?
• How many households are in temporary accommodation in England?
• How many people claim Pension Credit?
• How many children are in poverty in the UK?
• How many people sleep rough in England?
• How many people face food insecurity in the UK?

Links checked 2026-10-13. This page describes what the source publishes and gives no verdict on any claim.