HM Revenue and Customs collected £12,435 million in alcohol duty across the 2025 to 2026 financial year, £180 million less than the year before and the lowest annual total in the five years its Alcohol Bulletin currently sets out. The figures are provisional, and the fall happened in a year when duty rates went up rather than down, which is the part the trade has been chewing over since they landed.
Spirits took the sharpest knock. Receipts came in at £4,059 million, down £93 million or two per cent, the first annual fall since the duty system was rebuilt in August 2023. Beer fell by the same percentage to £3,452 million. Wine, other fermented products and cider held up best of the three, easing 0.4 per cent to £4,924 million, and that group now accounts for 40 per cent of everything the Treasury takes from alcohol, against 33 per cent from spirits and 28 per cent from beer.
The mechanics matter here. Since 1 August 2023, under the government's alcohol duty reform, HMRC has charged duty on every category by the litre of pure alcohol in the product rather than by category and volume, so the bill follows what is actually in the bottle. Rates then rose again in line with the Retail Price Index on 1 February 2026. When you raise the rate and collect less money, the explanation is not pricing. It is that less alcohol is leaving the warehouse.
The monthly detail shows how uneven that has been. Spirits receipts hit £532 million in November 2025 against £347 million in the same month a year earlier, then dropped to £206 million in January 2026 against £283 million the previous January. A rush followed by a lull is what stock being cleared ahead of a rate change tends to look like in the data, which is why the annual totals are the safer guide.
A little history helps. Before the 2023 overhaul, Britain taxed drinks through a patchwork of categories and bands built up over decades, with wine in particular paying by broad strength band rather than by its actual strength. The reform replaced that with one strength-based system and was presented as a simplification. What it also did was tie the tax on a drink very closely to its alcohol content. Trade bodies including UKHospitality have argued that this, combined with successive rate rises, is squeezing an industry already carrying higher costs, and its chair Kate Nicholls has warned that hospitality is facing price pressure at every turn this year. Public health groups read the same table differently, as evidence that consumption is drifting downwards. Both readings fit the numbers, which is usually a sign the numbers were worth publishing.
David Baddeley, founder of Boozy, said: "I read that table as a customer story rather than a tax story. People are buying fewer big bottles and thinking harder about what actually goes in the glass, and that shows up at the Treasury before it shows up anywhere else. It is uncomfortable for anyone whose business is built on volume. We would rather build ours on people knowing exactly what they are buying."
Boozy cans its cocktails in Greater Manchester and sells its Pornstar Martini as a fixed 200ml serve, with the full shaken method published at its Pornstar Martini recipe for anyone making one from scratch.
The same arithmetic HMRC uses to work out a duty bill, alcohol content rather than bottle size, is what decides the strength of a drink poured at home. The Cocktail ABV Calculator runs that sum across more than 100 recipes and returns the finished strength and the unit count for each one. It is a useful check for anyone who has ever free poured a measure and assumed it came to 25ml.
Boozy asks everyone to drink responsibly. Guidance on units, weekly limits and lower risk drinking is available at drinkaware.co.uk.
