Alcohol consumption and harms dashboard
Official statistics
- Published
- 30 June 2026 (Latest release)
- Type
- Statistical report
- Author
- Public Health Scotland
About this release
This release by Public Health Scotland (PHS) supplements the Alcohol Consumption and Harms Dashboard (ACHD) with a new dataset of alcohol retail sales and pricing estimates for years 2017 to 2025. In addition, there are updates to existing datasets within the ACHD on alcohol related crime and justice and homelessness figures to include those relating to financial year 2024/25. There is also an update to the dashboard's alcohol consumption statistics which incorporates responses from the 2024 edition of the Scottish Health Survey (SHeS). In this release the ‘Mean weekly units consumed’ and ‘AUDIT score’ pages have been dropped from the ‘Consumption’ section of the dashboard. ‘Mean weekly units consumed’ and ‘AUDIT score’ are still however available to view broken down by age group, SIMD quintile, income quintile, or sex in the ‘Other Scottish Health Survey (SHeS) Metrics’ tab which has been renamed to simply ‘Scottish Health Survey (SHeS) Metrics’. Further information regarding this change can be found below in the Background section of this summary.
In addition to these updates to the datasets within the Alcohol Consumption and Harms Dashboard this release is accompanied by a short report which provides contextual analyses of the alcohol retail sales and pricing estimates and the most recent wholly alcohol attributable hospital admissions and mortality statistics.
For further details, including contact information to discuss the changes outlined above, please refer to the Further Information section.
Main points
- In 2025, 10.7 litres of pure alcohol were sold per adult drinker in Scotland, equivalent to 20.7 units per adult drinker per week.
- Throughout the period from 2017 to 2025 the volume of pure alcohol sold per adult drinker per year in Scotland has fallen steadily from 12.7 litres in 2017 to 10.7 litres in 2025.
- The majority (76%) of alcohol sold in 2025 in Scotland was sold in off-trade premises such as supermarkets and other off-licenses. While total off-trade sales have declined since 2017, the proportion of alcohol sold in the off-trade has increased from 73% in 2017.
- Throughout the period from 2008 to 2024 the percentage of adult Scottish Health Survey respondents who identify as being non-drinkers has steadily increased from 12% in 2008 to 20% in 2024.
Background
The alcohol retail sales figures presented in this release are estimates. Data for these figures were obtained from market research specialists Nielsen IQ and Circana for 2017-2025. The volume of pure alcohol sold (litres) was provided for the on-trade by Nielsen IQ and for the off-trade by Circana. Copyright for the data remains with the data providers. The off-trade alcohol sales data presented in this dashboard are not comparable with data published in previous MESAS Monitoring Reports, as those data were obtained from a different data provider. For a comparison of different off-trade data sources for estimating alcohol retail sales, please see this report: Estimating population alcohol consumption in Scotland: the impact of using different sources of alcohol retail sales data.
Past releases of this dashboard have included pages where users could break down the SHeS metrics ‘Mean weekly units consumed’ and ‘AUDIT score’ by sex, combined at the same time with either age-group, SIMD quintile, or income quintile. Due to issues related to small sample sizes we can now only report these broken down by either age group, SIMD quintile, income quintile, or sex, i.e. we cannot combine sex concurrently with any of the other three metrics. We have therefore dropped the ‘Mean weekly units consumed’ and ‘AUDIT score’ tabs from the ‘Consumption’ section of the dashboard in this release. ‘Mean weekly units consumed’ and ‘AUDIT score’ are still however available to view broken down by age group, SIMD quintile, income quintile, or sex in the ‘Other Scottish Health Survey (SHeS) Metrics’ tab which has been renamed to simply ‘Scottish Health Survey (SHeS) Metrics’.
The June 2025 release of retail sales indicators slightly underestimated measurement of alcohol sales in the off trade. This was caused by a data analysis error which excluded the last week of off-trade data for 2024. The effect of applying the correction is that total litres sold in Scotland in the off-trade would have been 0.6% higher (32.1 million litres sold rather than 31.9 million litres sold) and litres sold per adult in the off-trade in Scotland would have been 0.7% higher (6.9 litres per adult rather than 6.8 litres per adult). In combined figures, total estimated litres sold would be 0.4% higher (42.1 million litres rather than 41.9 million litres) and per adult litres sold would be 0.6% higher (9.1 rather than 9.0 litres per adult). This error has been corrected for this publication and previously released 2024 data have been revised. These corrections have not resulted in any material changes to the underlying trends or messages previously reported.
Further information
The next release of this publication will be Autumn 2026.
General enquiries
If you have an enquiry relating to this publication, please contact phs.alcohol@phs.scot.
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If you have a media enquiry relating to this publication, please contact the Communications and Engagement team.
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Older versions of this publication
Versions of this publication released before 16 March 2020 may be found on the Data and Intelligence, Health Protection Scotland or Improving Health websites.