The official figure is £6.7 billion a year. It comes from a single sum, and most of its numbers date from 2004. We checked each one against 2025 evidence.
| ONS | 2025 evidence | |
|---|---|---|
| Sex workers | 68,500 | 102,000 |
| Clients a week | 25 | 6 |
| Weeks a year | 40 | 40 |
| Price a visit | £97 | £120 |
| A year | £6.66bn | £2.9bn |
The ONS added prostitution to the UK's national accounts in 2014, when EU rules made every member state count it. It sits in the household spending tables, between hairdressing and pet care. The ONS puts it at £6.66 billion for 2025. That's up 3.9% on 2024 and more than three times the 1997 figure.
The figure comes from a model, so it only moves when the model's inputs move. Those are the number of men in the UK and a price index. Take out inflation and 2025 was a fraction below 2019. The exception is 2020, when the ONS cut the figure by 31% for lockdown and then let it recover. A method change in 2016 lowered the whole series, all the way back to 1997.
There's no survey behind the figure. The ONS multiplies four assumptions together. Each year it rolls the answer forward using the number of men in the UK and a price index for "personal services", the group that includes lap dancing and escort agencies.
A charity rang round adverts and counted about 7,000 sex workers working indoors in London. The police added 115 on the street. The ONS scaled that up to the whole UK.
Taken from a Dutch statistics paper. The ONS tested 20, 25 and 30 but never said which it used. 25 is the one that matches its published total.
Cut to 40 in 2016 to allow for 12 weeks' holiday, a figure borrowed from Dutch statisticians.
Taken from Punternet, a website where clients review sex workers. The ONS reference list cites Punternet's Wikipedia page.
Follow those numbers through and they say some odd things:
"This is a weak assumption based on the market for prostitutes' services."
ONS method paper, 29 May 2014, on growing the 2004 headcount in line with the male population
"The average person working in prostitution is turning over nearly £100,000 a year, which … is completely implausible. When better figures come out I predict the UK will be due a substantial rebate."
Sir David Spiegelhalter, statistician, University of Cambridge, October 2014
"At no point as a sex worker did I ever see twenty-five clients in one week, much less on 'average.'"
Brooke Magnanti, writer and former sex worker, The Baffler, June 2014
We kept the ONS formula and changed the inputs. We used a 2025 headcount, the workloads sex workers report in surveys, and the prices they actually advertise.
From Erobella's 2025 study with Ronald Weitzer and others, which combines earlier estimates. Range 75,000 to 130,000. The ONS model implies about 68,500 today.
In a 2015 survey, 76% of sex workers who find clients online saw 1 to 10 a week. In a 2018 study, 54% worked 10 paid hours a week or less.
We kept the ONS's 40 weeks. That way the only differences are the number of workers, the number of clients and the price.
A typical hour on Erobella costs £140 and a half-hour £80. A study of a rival site found £120. Street prices are £20 to £40. £120 is a mix of all of these.
Our figure works out at £28,800 a year in takings for each sex worker. That's 24.5 million paid visits a year, about 471,000 a week. It fits what sex workers tell researchers. In the Beyond the Gaze survey, 52% earned under £20,000 a year and 10% earned £50,000 or more. A 2015 survey summed it up: most escorts "work 3 to 5 days a week and earn around £1,500 a month".
The ONS figure works out at £97,000 each, which doesn't fit any of that. Nor does the £70,000 each in a 2015 model written for the ONS. It assumed 120 to 150 paid hours a month, the hours of a full-time job.
Keep the ONS's 25 clients a week and use our headcount. That gives £9.9 billion. But it needs 102,000 people to each see 1,000 clients a year, and no survey of sex workers backs that up. We include it because journalists will ask.
Like the ONS figure, this is what clients spend on in-person sexual services. It isn't what sex workers earn after costs.
It leaves out the legal adult industry, which GDP already counts elsewhere. That includes strip clubs, porn, webcams and sites like OnlyFans. OnlyFans is covered in section 10.
The headcount includes people who work part time or now and then. That's why the number of clients matters so much. Our low case, 4 clients a week at £100, is the cautious reading of the same surveys.
The full method is in section 12. It includes Erobella's part in the headcount study.
The fairest comparisons come from the same ONS table, for the same year. On the official figure, UK households spend more on prostitution than at the dentist. It's more than twice what they spend on illegal drugs, and almost exactly what they spend at the vet.
Our £2.9 billion is smaller, but it's still big business. It's more than Greggs, which had sales of £2.15 billion in 2025, or Netflix in the UK, which took £2.06 billion. It's three times the UK cinema box office, and close to what NHS dentistry costs in England. The official figure is about the same as Greggs, Wetherspoon and Netflix UK put together.
On 26 September 2026 Erobella had 30,014 live UK listings, and 8,603 of them show an hourly price. The typical price for an hour, where the client visits, is £140. Half of all prices fall between £120 and £160. If the sex worker travels, it's about £40 more. A half-hour costs £80, two hours £260 and a night £1,000.
These are asking prices on one site, mostly from people working for themselves. So they show the upper half of the market, not parlours or the street. They match the only academic study of a rival site, which found a typical hour cost £120 in 2018 and 2019. They also match Erobella's 2024 pricing study, which found an average of £162.
| Council area | Region | Live listings | Hour, incall | Hour, outcall | Half-hour |
|---|
Across the UK there are 43 live listings for every 100,000 people. London has 94. Northern Ireland, where paying for sex has been a crime since 2015, has 20. Wales has 23. The ONS ignores all this. It gives London 13% of the total, the same as its share of adult men.
If we share our £2.9 billion out by where listings are and what they charge, London accounts for £0.9 billion. That's 31% of the total. The North West follows with £318 million and the South East with £305 million. Scotland's share is £190 million and Wales's £78 million.
Over the past year, each London listing was viewed 104 times on average. In the South West it was 421 times. Scotland and the North East come next, at 361 and 334. Where there are fewer listings, each one gets looked at more.
| Region | Live listings | Per 100k | Hour, incall | Hour, outcall | Views per listing | Modelled value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| London | 8,573 | 94.0 | £150 | £200 | 104 | £914m (31.1%) |
| South East | 3,301 | 34.1 | £130 | £170 | 204 | £305m (10.4%) |
| North West | 3,199 | 41.2 | £140 | £180 | 230 | £318m (10.8%) |
| West Midlands | 2,786 | 44.9 | £130 | £180 | 135 | £257m (8.8%) |
| East of England | 2,413 | 36.5 | £130 | £175 | 116 | £223m (7.6%) |
| Yorkshire and The Humber | 2,035 | 35.9 | £130 | £170 | 276 | £188m (6.4%) |
| South West | 1,946 | 32.9 | £135 | £180 | 421 | £187m (6.4%) |
| East Midlands | 1,818 | 35.7 | £120 | £160 | 232 | £155m (5.3%) |
| North East | 864 | 31.3 | £130 | £180 | 334 | £80m (2.7%) |
| Scotland | 1,913 | 34.5 | £140 | £200 | 361 | £190m (6.5%) |
| Wales | 735 | 23.1 | £150 | £170 | 316 | £78m (2.7%) |
| Northern Ireland | 383 | 19.9 | £150 | £200 | 112 | £41m (1.4%) |
Erobella's UK listings were viewed 8.2 million times in the year to 26 September 2026. The busiest hour is midnight to 1am, with 6.1% of all views. The quietest is 5am to 6am, with 1.8%. Just over a quarter of all views come between 10pm and 3am.
The day of the week hardly matters. Monday is the busiest, with 14.7% of views, and Thursday the quietest, with 13.9%. On this evidence it's a late-night habit, not a weekend one.
These are details people choose to put on their listing, on one site. They aren't a census. The median advertised age is 26.7, and 38% are under 25. 83% of listings are women, 10% trans and 7% men. 98% say they work for themselves rather than for an agency or venue.
21,616 listings give a nationality. Of those, 28% say Brazil and 23% the UK, followed by Spain, Romania and Italy. The last European study of this, in 2009, found 41% of UK sex workers were migrants. Among Erobella listings that give a nationality, it's about three in four.
No UK law exempts sex work from tax. HMRC's own guidance says a sex worker's profits count as trading income, like any self-employed person's. The Court of Appeal settled this in 1990, in a case involving a dominatrix known as Miss Whiplash. Escort agencies have to charge VAT. HMRC doesn't publish how much tax it collects from any of it.
VAT at 20% on the official figure would come to £1.33 billion a year if added on top of prices, or £1.11 billion if already included. That's a ceiling, not an estimate. Most sex workers earn far less than the £90,000 a year at which VAT starts. Income tax is the more realistic source, and on our figures it's modest.
Since January 2024, websites that pay UK sellers have had to report those payments to HMRC. That includes subscription sites like OnlyFans. HMRC's last targeted push was a 2015 taskforce aimed at "adult club owners, online escort agencies and adult entertainers". It put the size of the industry at "up to £5 billion".
| Sex worker's profit | Income tax | Class 4 NI | Total | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| £20,000 | £1,486 | £446 | £1,932 | 9.7% |
| £35,000 | £4,486 | £1,346 | £5,832 | 16.7% |
| £50,000 | £7,486 | £2,246 | £9,732 | 19.5% |
None of this is in the ONS prostitution figure. It's legal, and GDP already counts it as a digital service. But it's a big part of the UK's adult economy. OnlyFans is run by a company registered in the City of London. Its accounts for the year to 30 November 2025, filed on 20 September 2026, show fans paid $7.84 billion through the site worldwide. That's up from $7.22 billion the year before.
Creators got $6.2 billion of that. The company kept $1.55 billion, made $715 million before tax and paid $205 million in tax. It paid its sole shareholder $535 million in dividends, and declared another $174 million in the four months after the year end. Its owner, Leonid Radvinsky, died in March 2026. In May his family trust reportedly sold 16% of the company to Architect Capital for $535 million, valuing it at $3.15 billion.
The company doesn't say how many of its 5.06 million creator accounts are British. It reports $347 million of revenue from the UK and Europe together, and $965 million from the US. Across every creator account, the average payout for the year was about $1,200. A small number of top earners pull that average up.
In 2014 every EU country was told to add prostitution to GDP. The UK did, and now records one of the highest shares in Europe. France refused to count street prostitution, saying coerced sex isn't a transaction. Germany said it was already counted, because sex work is legal there. The US, Canada and Australia leave it out.
| Country | Latest published figure | Share of GDP | How it's worked out |
|---|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom | £6.66bn spending in 2025. Value added was 0.35% of GDP in 2010 | 0.22% | ONS model: a 2004 count grown with the male population, 25 clients a week |
| Italy | €4.8bn spending and €4.1bn value added in 2023 | 0.19% | Istat: workers by type × services a day × days worked × price |
| Spain | 0.35% of GDP in 2010, about €3.8bn | 0.35% | INE, published once, in 2014 |
| Netherlands | €0.7bn value added in 2021 | 0.08% | CBS: licence records and advert counts, with prices per service |
| Ireland | 0.72% of GDP in 2013, for drugs, prostitution and smuggling together | n/a | CSO: no separate figure published |
| Poland | 0.04% of GDP, pimping only | 0.04% | GUS: selling sex is legal there, so it counts as part of the hidden economy |
| Sweden | SEK 520m value added in 2006 | 0.02% | SCB. It fell after Sweden banned buying sex in 1999 |
| Germany | No separate figure | n/a | Destatis: sex work is legal, so it was already in GDP |
| France | Street prostitution left out | n/a | INSEE: coerced sex isn't a transaction, so it isn't counted |
| United States | Not counted. The BEA says it would add about $10bn a year, as of 2017 | n/a | BEA working paper |
| Canada, Australia | Not counted | n/a | StatCan and the ABS leave out illegal activity |
In short, we took the ONS's own formula and swapped each 2004 input for 2025 evidence. The formula is workers × clients a week × weeks × price. Then we checked the result against what sex workers say they earn.
Workers. 102,000, from "Estimating the Total Number of Sex Workers in the United Kingdom" by Weitzer, Bennett, Jensen, Macioti, Yang, Kiki and Shave. It was published as a preprint in August 2025 and summarised on Erobella. It combines earlier estimates rather than making a new count, and gives a range of 75,000 to 130,000. It includes people who sell sex part time or now and then. Erobella's Head of Data & Research is one of the authors.
Clients a week. 6 in the central case, 4 in the low case and 10 in the high case. In the NUM and University of Leeds survey of 240 sex workers who find clients online, in 2015, 76% saw 1 to 10 clients a week. 46% worked 3 to 5 days a week and 25% worked 1 or 2. In the Beyond the Gaze survey of 641 sex workers in 2016 and 2017, 54% spent 10 paid hours a week or less with clients. No UK survey asks how many weeks a year people work, so we kept the ONS's 40.
Price per visit. £120 central, £100 low and £140 high. On 26 September 2026, Erobella's live UK listings gave a median of £140 for an hour, from 7,052 listings, and £80 for a half-hour, from 6,108. A 2022 study by Yasseri, Sanders and others of 11,489 AdultWork profiles found a median of £120 an hour for women and £70 for men. A 2015 report for the ONS by Brooks-Gordon and others put street prices at £20 to £40. One blended price is a simplification. Short bookings, street work and parlours pull the average below the hourly median on Erobella.
Checks against the headcount study. The study says 73.5% of sex workers are women, 19.4% men, 3% trans and 4.1% non-binary, intersex or other. Weighting Erobella's median prices by those shares gives £133 for an hour and £75 for a half-hour. Add street work, which the study puts at 2% to 5% of the total, and a realistic mix of bookings comes to between about £100 and £130. So £120 holds. Charging every visit at the full hourly price would give £3.2 billion. The study also puts 35% to 40% of sex workers in London and the South East. Those two regions have 39.6% of Erobella's live listings.
Result. 102,000 × 6 × 40 × £120 = £2.9 billion. Low case: 102,000 × 4 × 40 × £100 = £1.6 billion. High case: 102,000 × 10 × 40 × £140 = £5.7 billion. These are spending figures, not value added. The ONS takes off a small amount for rent, clothes and condoms, which would lower both figures slightly.
The ONS model. Its inputs come from the ONS's May 2014 method paper by Abramsky and Drew, and its Blue Book 2016 revisions article. The 2025 figures we give for the ONS model are our own sums. We grew the 2004 headcount in line with the number of UK men aged 16 and over, from 23.3 million to 27.5 million. Then we found the price that makes 25 clients × 40 weeks add up to £6,655 million.
Regions. We shared the central estimate out by each region's share of live listings, weighted by its median hourly price. Listings were matched to council areas and regions from their location using postcodes.io. Listings per 100,000 people use ONS mid-2025 population estimates, and mid-2024 for Northern Ireland.
These figures are totals from the 30,014 live UK listings on Erobella on 26 September 2026. We could place 29,966 of them on a map. No individual listing is identified.
Prices are asking prices, mostly from people working for themselves. We show a median only where at least 40 listings give a price, and we removed impossible values. Age, gender and nationality are what people choose to say, and aren't checked.
Views are counted per view, not per person, over the 12 months to 26 September 2026. The site grew over that year, so we only use views to show patterns within the year, not trends.
The ONS hasn't been careless. Its 2014 paper is open about every gap. It calls its main assumption weak, and says its prostitution figures are "definitely weaker" than the rest of the accounts. But its inputs are 20 years old, and better evidence now exists. That evidence gives an answer less than half the size. The ONS could revise the figure in its Blue Book on 30 October.
This doesn't measure coercion or trafficking. By convention, national accounts only count deals both sides agree to, and so does our model. Erobella publishes separate research on sex workers' safety and wellbeing.
You're free to publish all findings, charts and tables. Please credit Erobella and, online, link to this page. The data is released under CC BY 4.0.
Press contact: Dara Weston, PR Manager, dara@erobella.com
Comment and interviews: Brenda Jensen, Head of Data & Research at Erobella
"The official figure isn't a measurement. It's four assumptions multiplied together, and three of them date from 2004. Put in what sex workers actually tell researchers about their week, and the number falls by more than half."
Brenda Jensen, Head of Data & Research at Erobella
"That doesn't make it small. Nearly three billion pounds is still more than Greggs takes in a year. But the official figure has been counting every sex worker as if they saw a thousand clients a year, and that's never been true."
Brenda Jensen
Also by Erobella Research: UK sex work statistics, the University Towns STI Index, Out on Campus, the Liberal Cities Index.
