The 38-year record of the pint ends at £4.83

In January 2025, a pint of draught lager in a British pub cost £4.83. We know that because the Office for National Statistics said so, in a series that had run every month since February 1987, when the same pint cost 92p.

That was the last entry. The series stops there.

Nobody announced it. There was no press release and no debate in Parliament, because the pint was not the point. Britain was rebuilding the way it measures inflation, the rebuild was a genuine improvement, and a thirty-eight-year record of what a pint costs was one of the things that did not make it across.

The ONS does still publish average prices for beer. They come from a different place, are built a different way, and cannot be compared with the old series or with anything before 2025. That is the actual story, and it is stranger than a simple disappearance.

A record that runs from 1987 to nowhere

The old series has a code, CZMS, and it is one of the more satisfying things the British state has ever produced. It tells you what a pint cost, in pence, every month for thirty-eight years.

February 1987: 92p. The year 2000: 200p. By 2015 it was 345p, and by December 2024 it had reached 482p. Then January 2025, 483p, and nothing.

There are two holes in it. April, May and June of 2020 are blank, and so are the first four months of 2021. The pubs were shut, the price collectors had nowhere to go, and the official record of what a pint costs contains a small gap in the shape of a pandemic.

What actually happened, in two stages

The change came in two steps, a year apart, and neither of them was about beer.

In February 2025, published that March, the ONS reorganised how it aggregates prices. Individual “items” were replaced by broader groupings called consumption segments, and production moved onto a new cloud-based system. The ONS describes this in its own words as a necessary step towards incorporating scanner data. It was preparation, not the thing itself.

The thing itself arrived a year later. With the February 2026 index, published on 25 March 2026, the ONS began using supermarket scanner data for roughly half the grocery market. Instead of around 25,000 prices a month written down by people walking into shops, the statisticians now work with about 300 million price points, drawn from sales of over a billion units a month, straight from the checkouts.

That is a serious upgrade, and it is difficult to argue against on the merits. It also has nothing to do with pubs. No supermarket checkout will ever scan a pint of draught lager, because a pint is bought over a bar. The pint was collateral in a project about groceries, caught up in the restructuring that the groceries work required.

An index is not a price

Here is the part that matters, and it is easy to miss.

The ONS never stopped measuring beer. Draught lager still sits in the inflation basket, prices are still collected, and the index still moves. What broke was the continuity of a published number in pounds and pence.

Those are not the same thing, and the difference is not academic. An index tells you about a ratio. It says a category rose 3.1% over twelve months, which is useful if you are pricing a commercial contract and almost useless if you are standing at a bar. A price tells you what it costs. £4.83 is a fact anyone can check, argue with, or be annoyed by.

Indices are also easier to revise. The ONS is scheduled to fold CPIH methods and data sources into the RPI from 2030 at the earliest, and when that happens the supplementary and lower-level indices of the RPI are due to be discontinued altogether. Each change is defensible on its own terms. The cumulative effect is that the long, boring, comparable record keeps getting shorter.

If you want to see what a record like that is good for, our purchasing power of the pound tool does the same job for the pound as a whole. It shows what money actually bought at different points in time, in things rather than percentages.

The same pint, two numbers, 41p apart

This is where the change stops being technical.

The old series put a pint of draught lager at £4.80 in October 2024. The Morning Advertiser, analysing ONS data, reported the figure for that same month as £4.39, rising to £4.51 a year later.

Same drink, same month, same source organisation, 41p apart. Neither number is wrong. They are built from different samples by different methods for different purposes, and there is no reason they should agree. But if you were following the price of a pint across 2025, you would have watched the number you were tracking fall by around 30p in a year when nobody in the trade thought pints were getting cheaper.

That is what a broken series looks like from the outside. Not an absence, but a step in the data that has nothing to do with the thing being measured.

The part where commercial agreements enter the story

There is one more layer, and the ONS is admirably direct about it.

From March 2026, the detailed price quote data that underpinned the inflation figures stopped being published for food and non-alcoholic drinks, for alcohol and tobacco, and for the equivalent RPI categories. The reason given is not cost or methodology. The ONS says its data-sharing agreements with the retailers supplying scanner data mean it can no longer publish that microdata, and states plainly that the coverage of its analytical microdata will be reduced.

So the trade is explicit. Britain gets much better inflation statistics, built on hundreds of millions of real transactions, in exchange for supermarkets keeping their pricing data commercially confidential. The headline number improves. The public working out behind it gets thinner.

The ONS has built replacement outputs, including regional indices and more granular average prices, and consulted users on what they needed. This is not a stitch-up. It is a reasonable institution making a reasonable trade, and the terms of that trade were set partly by companies that do not answer to the public.

Where Bitcoin comes into this

The pound has no fixed reference point. Its value is a matter of policy, and the instruments used to describe that value are built, maintained and occasionally retired by the institutions that manage it, sometimes on terms negotiated with private companies.

There is nothing sinister in that. But it does mean the ruler and the thing being measured come from the same workshop, and the workshop is entitled to change the ruler.

Bitcoin was built the other way round. Its issuance is written into the software: a hard cap of 21 million, a new block roughly every ten minutes, and a subsidy that currently pays 3.125 Bitcoin per block and halves at fixed intervals. Anyone can verify the whole supply from their own computer, at any time, without asking permission or waiting for a monthly bulletin. There is no publisher, so there is nobody to change the method, sign a confidentiality agreement, or stop publishing.

That is a real difference, and it is worth understanding on its own terms rather than as a sales pitch. Bitcoin’s price in pounds is volatile and has fallen by more than 70% from previous highs on several occasions. It is not a stable way to price a pint next Tuesday, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. What it offers is not stability of price. It is continuity of record.

If you want the plain-English version of how that actually works, start with WTF is Bitcoin.

Frequently asked questions

Does the ONS still publish the price of a pint? Yes, but not in the form it used to. The long-running RPI average price series for draught lager, which ran monthly from February 1987, ends in January 2025 at £4.83. Average prices for beer are still produced through the ONS shopping prices comparison tool, on a different basis that is not comparable with the old series.

Why did the old series stop? It was a consequence of a wider rebuild. From the February 2025 index, published in March 2025, the ONS moved from individual item indices to broader consumption segments in preparation for using supermarket scanner data, which went live with the February 2026 index in March 2026.

What does a pint cost in 2026? It depends who you ask. Industry surveys published in 2026 have put the UK average anywhere from around £4.60 to £5.50, with London well above that.

Why do different sources disagree about the price of a pint? They sample different pubs, different beers and different months, using different methods. Since the long-running official series ended, there is no single figure that settles the question.

Is RPI being scrapped? Not immediately. From 2030 at the earliest, CPIH methods and data sources are due to be introduced into the RPI, and the supplementary and lower-level indices of the RPI are scheduled to be discontinued at that point.

This article is education, not financial advice. Bitcoin is volatile and you should do your own research before making any investment decision.

Jordan Walker is the founder of The Bitcoin Collective and the Bitcoin Business Network. He organised the UK’s first Bitcoin-only conference, hosts The Bitcoin Collective podcast, and writes the weekly newsletter read by thousands of UK professionals.

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