Reference Case Number: FOI2026/01023
Freedom of Information: Right to know request:
1. Any data, estimates, or internal calculations held by the FCA that quantify the total cost of regulatory compliance borne by authorised firms, broken down by year (2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025).
2. Where held, please provide any breakdown of such costs by sector (for example, asset management, wholesale banking, retail banking, or other internal FCA sector classifications).
3. Where the FCA does not hold a single aggregated figure, please provide any internal estimates, models, or component data that contribute to an understanding of regulatory cost to firms (for example, compliance cost estimates used in impact assessments or policy development).
4. If the above information is not held in data form, please provide the most relevant summary-level documents or analyses (rather than full document sets) that address the cost or burden of regulation on firms, broken down by individual year (2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025), where such a breakdown is held.
FCA response:
Our Cost Benefit Analyses (CBAs) set out the Equivalent Annualised Net Direct Cost to Business (EANDCB) of a proposed rule change. This measure is also used in government impact assessments and is a general proxy for compliance costs. It includes all unavoidable costs that directly result from a regulation.
The EANDCB is an annualised figure calculated by summing up the discounted value of the stream of net direct costs which accrue over the appraisal period to reach the present value of the net direct costs, and converting this into an equivalent annual figure by dividing by the appropriate annuity rate (see our Statement of Policy on CBA[1]).
We have set out below the total value of the EANDCBs across all CBAs for all Policy Statements published in each of the previous three financial years. This sets out the additional net cost to business across all policies introduced in those respective years. We publish this figure on an annual basis as one of our Secondary International Competitiveness and Growth objective metrics: metric RI-M01[2]. Our figures for 2025/2026 will also be published in due course.
We have presented the raw figures reported in the CBAs and also converted to 2025/26 prices for ease of comparison, adjusting for inflation using HMT’s March 2026 GDP deflators.[3]
Total EANDCB across all CBAs for Policy Statements by year of introduction
| Year | Total value reported in CBAs (£m) | Total value in 2025/26 prices (£m) |
|---|---|---|
| 2023/24 | 73.8 | 79.3 |
| 2024/25 | 51.2 | 52.9 |
| 2025/26 | 426.3 | 426.3 |
EANDCBs for individual policy measures are set out in our published CBAs, available here[4].
Please note that given the way that we collate this data, we are unable to provide a breakdown of costs by sector. This is because many of our interventions cover multiple sectors and to disaggregate this data would result in us creating new information, which we are not required to do under FOIA.