These Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) quarterly
publications provide statistics on households affected by
the benefit cap and
include:
- cumulative and point-in-time numbers of households capped
- number of households that were previously capped but have
moved off the cap
The Benefit Cap Official Statistics cover the number of
households capped under:
- Housing Benefit (HB)
from April 2013
- Universal Credit (UC)
from October 2016
Changes to Benefit Cap statistics from September
2025
From the September 2025 release, data on capped Housing Benefit
(HB) households will only be
released via Stat-Xplore. The bulletin will still reference the
total number of capped HB households but will not contain
any narrative or graphs on HB and the data tables will no
longer contain any information on HB. This is due to the number of
capped HB customers being very low,
as HB is being
replaced by Universal Credit for working age customers, so
unsuitable for detailed analysis.
Figures relating to households with their UC capped are currently subject to
retrospection. Please note that from the September 2025 release
we only plan to refresh the previous 2 years statistics and
freeze the historical timeseries. This is in line with
methodology for UC household statistics due to
minimal retrospection after 2 years.
Further information
Find future Benefit Cap statistics publication dates in
our statistics release
calendar and more about our statistics on
the Statistics
at DWP page.
Email cbm.stats@dwp.gov.uk with
queries and feedback about the Benefit Cap statistics. We are
only able to reply to questions about the statistics.
Find further
breakdowns of Benefit Cap statistics in Stat-Xplore.
Latest release
