Flat trade for builders’ merchants: pricing and demand signals for project teams
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell
First reported on The Construction Index
30 Second Briefing
Builders’ merchants’ like-for-like value sales in Britain slipped 0.4% year-on-year in November 2025, with volumes down 8.5% and prices up 3.7%, while unadjusted takings fell 5.1% due to one fewer trading day. Renewables & Water Saving and Workwear & Safetywear grew by 5.1% and 4.0% respectively, but Timber & Joinery Products fell 2.4% and Heavy Building Materials dropped 8.4%, signalling continued weakness in core structural categories. Over the 12 months to November 2025, like-for-like sales edged up 1.1% as volumes rose 1.9% and prices eased 1.2%, indicating a flat but slightly cheaper materials market.
Technical Brief
- November 2025 unadjusted takings were hit by one fewer trading day versus November 2024.
- Month-on-month, November 2025 like-for-like value sales fell 2.0% versus October, despite calendar adjustment.
- Actual (unadjusted) month-on-month takings dropped 14.8%, reflecting three fewer trading days in November.
- November 2025 volumes declined 19.3% month-on-month, while average selling prices increased a further 5.7%.
- Over December 2024–November 2025, total unadjusted value sales rose only 0.7% despite an extra trading day.
- Consumer Confidence Index moved from -19 in November to -17 in December, signalling modest sentiment recovery.
- GfK major purchase index improved from -15 to -11 in December, implying potential uplift for RMI-heavy merchants.
Our Take
With Builders Merchant Building Index data showing a 1.9% twelve‑month volume increase in Britain against only a 0.7% unadjusted value gain, merchants are likely seeing margin pressure as price growth (3.7% year‑on‑year in November) is not fully translating into higher takings.
The outperformance of renewables and water‑saving products in the BMBI basket, alongside a still‑negative GfK Consumer Confidence index (‑17 in December), suggests retrofit and efficiency‑driven work is underpinning merchant volumes more than discretionary home improvement in the United Kingdom.
Across the 36 Materials stories in our database, few have such tight coupling to consumer sentiment metrics as this BMBI/GfK Consumer Confidence read‑across, which gives project contractors a useful leading indicator for near‑term demand in domestic RMI and small‑scale building work in Britain.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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