How I count what Britain is planning, and what I will publish when the counter reaches 30

Published 13 August 2026

Most renovation websites in Britain hold a great deal of data about their visitors and publish almost none of it, or publish it as marketing. I want to do the opposite: hold as little as possible, and be plain about what the little I hold can support. This article is the method, written down before the numbers arrive rather than after.

What the counter knows

• At most one row per tool and project type in a browsing session. The row holds which tool was used, the project type or room it was used for, whether it came from this site or an embedded widget, the month and day, and the moment it was written. Price the same project twice in one visit and it is still one row, so the counter measures sessions rather than clicks.
• No amounts. What you type into the calculator never leaves your browser, so the counter could not tell you anyone's budget even if I wanted it to.
• The counter can tell 14 project types apart, which is simply the list the calculator offers, plus a bucket for anything outside it.
• Nothing that identifies a person, a household or a device. There is no account behind a calculation, no cookie that follows you, and no postcode in the counter. The only thing kept on your side is a flag in the browser session that stops the same row being sent twice, and it never leaves the browser or outlives the session.

What it says today

Nothing, yet. The counter stood at zero counted sessions when it was last aggregated on 4 August 2026, and this site publishes no shares at all until it reaches 30. Below that line the honest answer to what Britain is planning is that I do not know, so that is what this page says.

It would be easy to publish something anyway. Five rows would produce percentages, the percentages would round to whole numbers, and a whole number in a table reads like a measurement whatever the sample behind it. That is how a data story becomes a fiction, and it usually happens on the way from a spreadsheet into a headline rather than in anyone's imagination.

Why there are thresholds at all

Two lines, both set before there was any data to be tempted by. A project type gets its own line from 5 counted sessions. The section itself appears from 30. Below those numbers the page renders nothing rather than something cautious, because a caveat under a table never travels as far as the table does.

The same thresholds run on the Dutch side of this project, where the counter has been going for longer. Using one rule for both is deliberate: a threshold you can move once is not a threshold, it is a negotiation with yourself.

Plans are not completed work

What this data will and will not be able to say

• It will be able to say which projects people arrive with, and how that mix shifts from quarter to quarter. Seasonality alone should be visible: extensions and roofs behave differently from bathrooms.
• It will never say what anything cost. There are no amounts in the counter, so any price story would have to come from the published sources the cost pages already use.
• It will not split by region. A postcode would make the data more interesting and the visitor less anonymous, and that trade is not one I am willing to make.
• It will not tell you whether the work happened. A calculation is the beginning of a plan, and a good share of plans quietly become something else.

Where to look while the counter fills

For what renovation work costs, the cost calculator gives a range for your own project from published UK figures rather than from anything other visitors typed. For how those costs move over time, the renovation cost index is built on Office for National Statistics data, which is a proper statistical series rather than a usage counter. For where you live, the regional pages apply a factor to the national guide.

The aggregation runs quarterly. When the counter clears 30, the table appears here and on the cost index page at the same time, from the same file, with the sample size printed next to every row.

Sources

• The anonymous usage counter of this site, calculator events only, aggregated quarterly by scripts/rs-plannen.mjs (last aggregated 4 August 2026, n=0 after deduplication to one row per project type per session, shares published from n=5 per project type and the section itself from n=30).

Where to go next

More from the blog

• Why every honest UK renovation price is a range
• The 21 July 2026 Boiler Upgrade Scheme change, explained

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