£334bn a year. £9.9bn overpaid, £1.2bn quietly underpaid.
The largest single thing the state does with your money, and the one most argued about with the fewest actual numbers. What is spent, who receives it, what is lost to fraud and error, and what is quietly underpaid.
14 figures, each with its official source.
DWP benefits plus tax credits, child benefit and Northern Ireland social security. Larger than the entire NHS budget, and the single biggest thing the state does with your money.
Benefits supporting disabled people and people with health conditions, across all ages. Just under a quarter of the social security bill, and the fastest-growing part of it.
Overwhelmingly Personal Independence Payment, with around 144,000 people still on the older Disability Living Allowance.
Roughly a third of the health and disability total, the rest going to pensioners and to health-related elements of Universal Credit.
About 24% more, after allowing for the government's own reform measures. Because very few people leave disability benefits once awarded, the caseload keeps growing even in years when new awards fall.
As a primary or secondary condition among working-age disability benefit claimants. The largest single change in what the caseload is made of over a decade, and the reason the argument about it has changed too.
New claims stopped rising in mid-2024 and have fallen a little since spring 2025. The caseload still grows, because even a reduced inflow exceeds a very small outflow.
3.2% of £308.6bn of benefit expenditure. This is the DWP-specific figure. The £55bn to £81bn on the waste page is a whole-of-government estimate covering tax and all other spending, so the two are not alternatives to each other.
2.2% of spending. Fraud here means the department has evidence or suspicion of intent, which is a higher bar than an incorrect claim. Claimant error accounts for £2.0bn.
0.4% of spending. Official error is overpayment caused by the department, not the claimant, and it is recovered from the claimant all the same.
0.4% of spending, and all of it official error. Underpayment gets a fraction of the attention overpayment gets, and every pound of it was owed to someone who qualified for it.
£6,720m of £79.2bn. Down from 9.5% the year before, so the direction is right. Universal Credit alone accounts for more than two-thirds of all benefit overpayment.
£0.6bn of Universal Credit, £0.2bn of other DWP benefits and £0.4bn of Housing Benefit, against £9.9bn overpaid in the same year. Recovery is real and it is not remotely keeping pace.
Neither the overpayment nor the underpayment rate moved significantly, on the department's own statistical test, despite a counter-fraud push. Total expenditure rose from £286.6bn to £308.6bn over the same period.