Is UK welfare spending rising by £97.5bn over six years?

What was claimed

@PolitlcsUK, an account that posts summaries of UK political news (not an official source), wrote on X on 28 October, the day of the OBR’s forecast, that welfare spending “will rise to £431.3bn by 2030/31 - an increase of £97.5bn a year in cash terms”. One commentator, quoting that post, wrote on 30 October that welfare is rising by “one and a half defence budgets a year”.

What the data shows (fact)

The figures come from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the UK’s official budget forecaster, in its October 2026 forecast published on 28 October (Table 5.5). They are in cash terms, not adjusted for inflation:

• Welfare spending was £333.8bn in 2025-26 and is forecast to reach £431.3bn in 2031-32. The 2030-31 figure is £413.1bn.
• £431.3bn minus £333.8bn is £97.5bn: a six-year cash rise, so spending is £97.5bn a year higher by 2031-32, not £97.5bn more each year (our arithmetic).
• Year by year, the rises run from £14.5bn to £18.9bn, about £16bn a year on average (our arithmetic).
• As a share of the economy (GDP), welfare goes from 10.9% to 11.3%.

In real terms (adjusted for inflation), the rise is about £47bn, or 14%, against 29% in cash (our calculation, using the OBR’s forecast for economy-wide prices). Pensioner spending accounts for about £48.4bn of the cash rise (our arithmetic).

The Ministry of Defence’s total budget is £68.3bn in 2026-27 (MoD, June 2026). On that basis, the six-year rise is about 1.4 defence budgets, and the average yearly rise about a quarter of one (our arithmetic).

Verdict (@PolitlcsUK): Missing context. The numbers are the OBR’s: spending ends £97.5bn a year higher, a rise built up over six years. The post also slips a year: that level is reached in 2031-32, not 2030/31.

The commentator’s “one and a half defence budgets a year” is wrong: welfare is forecast to rise by about a quarter of the MoD budget a year; “one and a half” fits only the six-year total.

Why it matters. Reading a six-year total as a yearly rise makes the increase look about six times bigger.

What would settle it. Nothing more is needed on the arithmetic; the forecast itself can change. The OBR says that if health and disability caseloads kept rising at their post-pandemic pace, welfare spending in 2031-32 would be about £25bn higher than forecast; if they slowed to pre-pandemic rates, about £13bn lower.

This is not financial advice.