About 26.5% of adults in England are living with obesity, based on 2023 to 2024 data from the UK government. When you include people who are overweight but not yet obese, that figure jumps to 64.5%, meaning nearly two in three adults carry excess weight. Across Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, the numbers are similar, with rates ranging from 25% to 32% depending on the nation and survey year.
Obesity Rates Across the Four Nations
Scotland has the highest overall rate of overweight and obesity among adults at 66% in 2023/24, with roughly 32% of adults classified as obese specifically. England and Northern Ireland sit close together, with England at 64.5% overweight or obese (26.5% obese) and Northern Ireland at 27.6% obese in 2023/24. Wales reports the lowest combined overweight and obesity rate at 61% in 2022/23, with obesity at around 25% to 27% depending on sex.
These differences are relatively small, and the overall trend is the same everywhere: rates have crept upward over the past decade across all four nations.
How BMI Categories Work
These statistics are based on body mass index, a simple calculation using height and weight. The UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) classifies adults into the following categories:
- Healthy weight: BMI 18.5 to 24.9
- Overweight: BMI 25 to 29.9
- Obesity class 1: BMI 30 to 34.9
- Obesity class 2: BMI 35 to 39.9
- Obesity class 3 (severe): BMI 40 or above
BMI has well-known limitations. It doesn’t distinguish between muscle and fat, and it can underestimate health risks in some ethnic groups while overestimating them in others. NICE now recommends that clinicians also consider waist measurements and waist-to-height ratio as indicators of health risk, particularly for people whose BMI sits near the borderlines.
Differences by Sex and Ethnicity
Men are more likely than women to fall into the overweight or obese range. A large-scale study estimating BMI distributions across England found that 97% of male subgroups (broken down by age and local area) had an average BMI in the overweight range, compared with 90% of female subgroups. That doesn’t mean 97% of men are overweight individually, but it shows how widespread elevated weight is among men across nearly every age group and region.
Ethnicity plays a significant role too. UK government data from 2021/22 shows that 70.8% of Black adults in England were overweight or obese, the highest rate of any ethnic group. White British adults came in at 65.2%, while Asian adults were at 57.6%. Chinese adults had the lowest rate at 33.1%. These figures use standard BMI thresholds, which may not capture risk equally across all ethnic backgrounds, since some groups develop weight-related health problems at lower BMI levels.
Childhood Obesity
The picture among children is concerning and getting worse. Data from the National Child Measurement Programme covering the 2024/25 academic year, which measured over 1.1 million children in state schools, found that 10.5% of reception-age children (ages 4 to 5) were living with obesity. By Year 6 (ages 10 to 11), that figure more than doubled to 22.2%. These are the highest levels recorded outside of the pandemic period.
Scotland reports that nearly one in five children aged 2 to 15 are at risk of obesity. In Wales, 11.4% of children aged 4 to 5 were obese in 2022/23. The sharp increase between early childhood and the end of primary school suggests that the primary school years are a critical window where weight gain accelerates for many children.
The Economic Cost
Obesity is a leading driver of long-term conditions including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and several cancers. The UK government estimates that obesity costs the country £74 billion annually when factoring in healthcare, lost productivity, and social care. Of that total, £11 billion falls directly on the NHS. That makes obesity one of the single largest drains on the health system, comparable to smoking.
How the UK Compares Over Time
The proportion of adults living with obesity in England has roughly doubled since the early 1990s. In 1993, obesity rates were around 15% for men and 16.4% for women. Today, with the overall rate at 26.5%, the increase has been steady rather than sudden, adding roughly a percentage point every two to three years. The rate of increase has slowed somewhat in the last decade, but it hasn’t reversed. Every age group, region, and income level has seen rises, though the steepest increases have occurred in the most deprived areas of the country.
Scotland’s rate of 32% makes it one of the highest in Western Europe. The UK as a whole consistently ranks among the top three or four countries in Europe for adult obesity, trailing only a handful of nations like Malta and Turkey depending on the data source and year.