Research and analysis

Annual qualifying defence contract statistics: 2022/23

The annual statistics bulletin is part of a regular published series of statistical reports, containing analysis of key QDC/QSC information.

Documents

Accompanying data book

Details

This annual publication includes analysis of all contracts that became a QDC/QSC between 1 April 2022 and 31 March 2023, and data for Quarter 4 2022/23 within the quarterly series of bulletins. Data is also presented from April 2015, when the first QDC was entered into.

The SSRO was notified of 568 contracts that became QDCs/QSCs by 31 March 2023. Contractors have one month after the date the contract becomes a QDC/QSC to submit reports and this analysis is based on 535 contracts for which the SSRO had received contract reports by 30 April 2023. These 535 contracts are comprised of 459 QDCs and 76 QSCs. The bulletin includes statistics on the outturn costs and profits of 112 contracts which have now completed.

For contracts that became QDCs/QSCs in 2022/23, the estimated total contract price of QDCs/QSCs was £3.2 billion, and £83.6 billion for all QDCs/QSCs across all years. The average estimated contract profit rate of QDCs/QSCs was 9.54 per cent for QDCs/QSCs in 2022/23.

The SSRO would like to make users aware of a number of changes following stakeholder feedback that have been made to the annual statistics as follows:

  • A new statistic showing the change over time to the total estimated contract price by financial year in which the contract became a QDC/QSC.
  • A new statistic showing the cumulative flow of the estimated price of contracts that have completed and contracts that are active.
  • A new breakdown to the mean and median estimated contract price statistics, to show the average contract price by QDC and QSC.

The publication schedule for the next four quarterly bulletins is as follows:

Quarterly bulletin Date Published
Q1 2023/24 29 August 2023
Q2 2023/24 November 2023
Q3 2023/24 February 2024
Q4 2023/24 Annual Statistics – June 2024

Updates to this page

Published 22 June 2023
Last updated 9 July 2024 + show all updates
  1. Corrected an issue with the “Number of QDCs/QSCS” in Figure 17 of the accompanying databook.

  2. First published.

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