ADS Group UK Aerospace & Defence Facts and Figures

Once a year the UK's aerospace, defence, security and space trade association counts its own industry, and the total is larger than most budgets assume. ADS Group UK Aerospace & Defence Facts and Figures is that count - filed under Aerospace & Defense - and its 2025 headline reads: GBP 109.9bn combined turnover (up 62% in a decade), GBP 46.8bn value added (up 65%), GBP 50bn in exports equal to 45% of turnover, 468,500 direct jobs (up 39% over ten years), 29,000 apprentices, and GBP 99.9k of output per worker.

The guide splits those totals into four sector panels - UK Aerospace, UK Defence, UK Security & Resilience, and UK Space - each carrying turnover, value added, exports, headcount, output per worker and R&D spend, plus a twelve-region employment map and charted annual series back to 2015. Underlying figures are collated from the ONS, Oxford Economics, the Department for Business and Trade, the Ministry of Defence, London Economics work for the UK Space Agency, and ADS's own estimates - a trade-association consensus view no single statistical agency publishes.

Get a sample of this dataset and see the sector panels before you commit analysis time.

Rows below reproduce the guide's headline panels exactly as they print - one metric per sector, growth columns carrying decade deltas, and the reference year attached to every figure:

# sector panel: combined totals, 2025 first estimates
sector Combined   metric Value added   value GBP 46.8bn    growth_10yr 65%   year 2025
sector Combined   metric Turnover     value GBP 109.9bn   growth_10yr 62%   year 2025
sector Combined   metric Exports      value GBP 50bn      share_of_turnover 45%   growth_since_2015 68%

# sector panels, per-sector grain
sector UK Defence         metric Turnover / Value add / Employees   value GBP 36.5bn / GBP 15.8bn / 189,500   rd GBP 4.3bn
sector UK Space (2022/23) metric Turnover / Value add / Exports / Employees
                          value GBP 18.6bn / GBP 7.2bn / GBP 5.5bn / 55,500

# regional employment, twelve UK regions and nations
South East 85,000   London 82,000      South West 76,000   North West 53,500
Scotland 37,000     East of England 31,000   East Midlands 30,000   West Midlands 24,500

Read the structure rather than reciting digits. Each sector panel resolves into the same six-metric shape, so the four sectors stack into one comparable table without remapping anything. The growth columns are the guide's own decade framing - turnover +62%, exports +68%, employment +39% since 2015 - which saves you rebuilding a baseline from older editions. And the (2022/23) tag on the space row is deliberate honesty: that sector reports on an older survey cycle, and the label travels with the number wherever it goes.

Eleven fields cover the whole publication, each definition verified against the printed values during the August 2026 review - the reason this record holds a 6/10 quality score against a catalog averaging 7.81: the guide is authoritative on its forty-odd indicators but stops there, and we score depth honestly. Every sector panel carries the same column set:

• Geography: the United Kingdom as a whole, then employment split across twelve regions and nations - South East 85,000, London 82,000, South West 76,000, North West 53,500, Scotland 37,000, down to 9,000 each in the North East and Northern Ireland. The cluster map is the quiet story: South East, London and South West together hold roughly 243,000 of the 468,500 direct jobs - more than half the workforce on three regions.
• Temporal: annual editions; the 2026 edition reports 2025 first estimates compiled during Q1 2026, with charted annual series for gross value added, employees and turnover running 2015 through 2025e, and R&D figures referenced to 2024. The space sector sits on a 2022/23 survey cycle and says so.
• Grain: four sector panels plus combined totals; six economic indicators per panel; one regional employment table; three charted time series. Roughly forty headline indicators in total - small by row count, decisive by influence.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

The annual edition lands once and stays stable for a year, so most teams take it whole and join it against faster-moving feeds: sector totals as typed numeric columns rather than scraped prose, regional employment flattened to one row per area ready for a geocoded join, and the (2022/23) space label preserved as data instead of footnoted away. Cadence is yours to set - a yearly refresh matches the underlying rhythm, while hourly or weekly delivery makes sense when these figures anchor a dashboard that must simply never go blank. Every delivery carries reference years per row, so a 2022/23 space figure can never masquerade as a 2025 one downstream.

Five jobs the guide settles outright:

1. Defence-industrial market sizing - GBP 109.9bn turnover and 468,500 direct jobs make the UK defence-industrial base concrete, whether you are sizing an addressable segment or pressure-testing a policy claim; see market sizing.
2. Citation-grade research and briefing - trade-association consensus figures collated from the ONS, MoD and Oxford Economics carry authority in briefings no blog aggregator matches; see citation-grade research.
3. Regional footprint and site selection - the twelve-region employment table locates the workforce before any facility, hiring or supply decision; see supply chain mapping.
4. Competitive benchmarking across the four sectors - identical metrics per panel mean aerospace versus defence versus security comparisons need no normalization work; see competitor tracking.
5. Investor context for the sector - decade growth rates (+62% turnover, +39% employment) and R&D intensity per sector give portfolio narratives a defensible denominator; see quant backtesting for signal work layered on top.

What it deliberately is not: company-level. The guide measures sectors, not firms - pair it with firmographic data the moment a question acquires a company name.

Market researchers and analysts get the definitive top-down frame for UK aerospace, defence and security markets - four sectors, six metrics, one consistent methodology; see market researchers use cases. Journalists, academics and students inherit quotable, attributed numbers for defence-economy reporting and research without reconciling statistical agencies; see journalists academics use cases. Competitive-intelligence and product teams benchmark client sectors against the trade association's own arithmetic; see competitive intel use cases. Investors and quants use sector growth and R&D intensity as context variables, though nothing here moves at trading frequency; see investors quants use cases. Sales-growth teams get territory-level employment counts for planning, and should know the guide's edge: it names sectors and regions, never accounts - see sales growth teams use cases.

Notes worth reading next:

• NATO Defence Expenditure Data - the government-spending side of the same equation; the guide measures industry, NATO measures ministries.
• SIPRI Military Expenditure Database - cross-national spending context that turns a UK-only picture comparative.
• SIPRI Arms Transfers Database - the export flows behind the guide's GBP 50bn export line, tracked deal by deal.
• European Defence Agency Defence Data - the European counterpart, useful once the question crosses the Channel.
• The Military Balance, IISS - capabilities and orders where the guide stops at economic footprint.

Two glossary notes sharpen the vocabulary: what value added actually measures when a trade association quotes it, and how GDP by industry frames the same arithmetic nationally. Then browse the full best aerospace defense datasets shelf or the aerospace defense data hub - and if any of these rows belong in your models, get a sample scoped to the sectors you actually analyze.