The Financial Times saw marginal year-on-year growth in circulation in August, with every other newspaper continuing to decline.

The FT had a circulation of 105,748 in August compared to 105,213 the year before. Its newsstand sales and non-UK circulation grew although paid subscriptions and bulks (copies distributed for free at locations such as airports and hotels) were down.

Month-on-month, the only newspapers to see growth were the Daily Star Sunday, up 2% to 103,200 and the Scottish title Daily Record which was up by 1% to 69,316. Both are owned by Reach.

The Evening Standard also upped its free distribution, although by less than 1%. Its print readership in July was its lowest since before it went free in October 2009, with August the second lowest. Its year-on-year decline of 19% was one of the biggest in our table.

Fellow London free title City AM is also at its lowest distribution (36,640) since its 2005 launch. Its print edition was paused for 18 months during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Reach-owned Sunday People’s circulation was down the most, by 22% to 82,597, with DC Thomson’s Sunday Post down by 20% to 48,943.

Scroll down or click here for new graphs charting the ups and downs of the UK national press in the past 20 years.

National newspaper circulations in August 2022 (ABC) with monthly and yearly changes – this page will be updated monthly:

The column for bulks refers to copies which are circulated for free at venues such as airports and hotels.

The above figures do not include the Sun, Times and Telegraph titles which have all chosen to keep their ABC circulations private since the start of 2020. The Guardian and Observer joined them in September 2021.

The last ABC figures we have for these titles are as follows:

• The Sun: 1,210,915 (March 2020)
• The Sun on Sunday: 1,013,777 (March 2020)
• The Sunday Times: 647,622 (March 2020)
• The Times: 365,880 (March 2020)
• Daily Telegraph: 317,817 (December 2019)
• Sunday Telegraph: 248,288 (December 2019)
• The Observer: 136,656 (July 2021)
• The Guardian: 105,134 (July 2021)

2021/22 in focus

These charts show UK national newspaper circulation over the past 12 months.

They should be seen in the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, which hit the UK from March 2020. Free daily Metro was by far the hardest hit as commuters disappeared from train stations and other key locations almost overnight. Circulation had started to bounce back as publisher DMGT ramped up distribution again, but the title faced a small slump in circulation in November 2020 and a larger one again in January 2021 – coinciding with the start of England’s second and third lockdowns. In May 2021 it returned to distributing 1m copies per day.

2000-present

We have also charted the longer-term change in ABC circulation over the past 20 years across the UK press.

These charts show the extent of the print decline from The Sun reaching 3.76m in 2000 and the Sun on Sunday’s launch in February 2012 with a short-lived 3.21m before dropping to just above 2m.

Meanwhile, though the Daily Mirror and Daily Mail once were competitive in print reach at around 2.3m-2.4m in 2000, the Mail now has a circulation three times the size of its former rival.

The Sunday tabloids all saw a spike in 2011 after the closure of the News of the World but few retained the readers – the Sunday People and Sunday Mirror did best at doing so, but largely lost them when the Sun on Sunday launched.

These charts will be updated each month to include the latest figures.

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Continue reading for previous months’ coverage of the UK’s most popular newspapers.

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The UK’s regional print daily newspapers saw their circulations fall by an average of 18% in the second half of 2020.

Non-dailies audited by ABC saw average circulation declines of 21%, according to Press Gazette’s analysis.

Online regional press readership is growing fast, but no longer audited by ABC.

The following tables show the Manchester Evening News saw its circulation fall year-on-year by 46% between July and December as it went from giving out 14,890 free copies in 2019 to just 3,062 on average because of the pandemic.

Looking only at its paid-for figures, the MEN’s year-on-year decline was 15% to 13,723.

Scroll down for full lists of ABC data for regional dailies and non-dailies, and select online audience figures

Otherwise, the hardest-hit dailies were the Express & Star in the Midlands which saw its circulation fall by 40% to 20,025, The Scotsman which fell by 28% to 10,437, and The Post which was down by 25% to 7,292.

The biggest regional newspaper in the UK remains the Aberdeen Press & Journal with an average circulation of 33,194 following a year-on-year decline of 16%.

They are followed by the Belfast-based Irish News on 28,353, which was down 9% year-on-year.

The smallest circulation decline seen by any daily paper was a drop of 8% at The Argus in Brighton, followed by The Courier in Dundee and the Belfast News Letter which fell by 12% each.

[Read more: ABC figures for first half of 2020 show most regional dailies lost 10-20% of circulation in lockdown]

Only a small number of Newsquest newspapers appear in the tables as the publisher pulled most of its titles from the auditor in 2019. The Daily Echo titles, Oxford Mail, Swindon Advertiser, Brighton Argus and York Press are the only ones with circulations that remain public.

There is no year-on-year change data for JPI Media’s non-daily titles as its 2019 figures are not available on ABC.

The worst-hit titles of those with figures available were the Nuneaton News, down 81% year-on-year to 3,053, and the free Chronicle and Informer which was down 56% to 7,439.

Seven non-daily titles grew their circulation in the second half of 2020, led by Archant’s Hackney Gazette which was up by 12% to 1,560 and Reach’s MEN on Sunday which was up by 9% to 5,829.

Online figures

Most regional publishers have stopped reporting online figures through ABC in recent years, but some have shared select recent data on request from Press Gazette

Reach, the biggest local publisher in the UK, said its regional network reached 38.7m adults in the UK in January, with visitor growth of 16% year-on-year, according to Comscore.

Newsquest said its websites attracted 45.6m unique visitors in January, up 32.9% year-on-year, generating 260m page views – an average of 5.7 pages per reader.

The publisher, which rolled out digital paywalls and subscriptions on 70 of its larger sites from April last year, said its monthly unique visitors were up 40.1% in the second half of 2020 with an average of 41.5m per month.

Newsquest chief executive Henry Faure Walker said: “We’re particularly encouraged by the growth in Newsquest’s digital subscription business which is substantially ahead of expectations, and our new paywalls have had no significant constraint on the ongoing traffic growth we are seeing.”

Archant said its news titles had collectively grown their average monthly unique visitors from 7.1m in the second half of 2019 to 8.2m in the same period in 2020, growth of 15%.

Its total page views grew by 13% year-on-year from 32m to 36.4m.

Flagship titles the Eastern Daily Press and East Anglian Daily Times grew by 22% to 2.1m monthly unique visitors and 42% to 1.1m respectively.

The Great Yarmouth Mercury grew its unique visitors by 30% year-on-year to 260,000 while the Hunts Post was up 32% to 142,000 per month.

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