The UK hospitality industry has recorded its best bank holiday trading performance in history over the Easter weekend just passed, with UKHospitality's preliminary spend estimate coming in at £2.9 billion — ahead of the £2.8 billion forecast published last week and representing a 9% increase on Easter 2025's final figure of £2.67 billion.
The figure covers the four-day period from Good Friday through Easter Monday and encompasses all consumer spend at hotels, restaurants, pubs, bars and cafés across the United Kingdom. It is based on aggregated EPOS data from UKHospitality member businesses, card transaction data from payments processors and booking platform conversion data, and is subject to revision when final figures are confirmed later this month.
UKHospitality chief executive Kate Nicholls said this morning: "This is an outstanding result for the industry and a real reflection of the sustained recovery in hospitality's consumer appeal. Families chose to celebrate Easter out of home in record numbers, and operators across every sector delivered the experiences that justified that choice. These figures matter not just commercially but as a signal to investors, policymakers and operators themselves about the underlying health of the sector."
Sector Breakdown
Pubs and bars performed most strongly against forecast, with the combination of Easter Sunday sunshine across England and Wales driving beer garden trading that BBPA described on Sunday as the best single day for outdoor sales in its recorded history. The final weekend figure for licensed premises is estimated at £980 million, up 12% year-on-year.
Restaurants delivered the largest absolute growth against the 2025 comparable, with Easter Sunday bookings at record levels and pre-payment models significantly reducing the no-show problem that historically suppressed bank holiday revenue. Estimated total restaurant sector spend for the weekend is £1.1 billion.
Hotels and accommodation benefited from high occupancy across virtually all leisure markets — rural destinations in particular were fully booked weeks before arrival — and from increased ancillary spend on food, beverage and spa within property. Total accommodation sector contribution is estimated at £830 million for the weekend.
The Weather Factor
Industry analysts are cautious about weighting the 2026 Easter result too heavily as a structural benchmark, noting that favourable weather conditions — above-average temperatures and sunshine across England and Wales through Sunday and Monday — contributed materially to the beer garden and outdoor dining performance that drove the above-forecast result. A wet Easter, as several recent ones have been, would present a very different picture for the pub sector in particular.
The underlying structural trend, however, is considered robust independent of weather. Easter Sunday has now been the highest-booked day in UK restaurant history for two consecutive years, and the growth in hotel leisure demand over Easter reflects a sustained shift in domestic holiday behaviour that is not weather-contingent.
What Operators Are Saying
Feedback from operators gathered by The Mise over the weekend and this morning is broadly positive but laced with the operational notes that characterise any record trading day: kitchen throughput pressure, last-minute staffing challenges, supply constraints for specific items — whole lambs and certain seafood were cited by multiple operators as selling through faster than anticipated — and the ongoing tension between maximising covers and protecting service quality.
"Record trading days are not straightforward days," says one general manager of a managed pub group site in the Midlands. "They're the days that test every system and every person at the same time. You're grateful for the trade and exhausted by the end of it, and you spend the week after catching up on everything that didn't get done while you were firefighting."
UKHospitality's full Easter 2026 trading report, including regional breakdowns and sector-by-sector analysis, will be published on 22 April.