The cost of keeping a prisoner behind bars has risen to more than £60,000 a year, the latest Government figures have shown.
The average cost per prisoner in a public-sector prison in England and Wales was £60,018 in 2024/25, according to Ministry of Justice data published last week. The figure is up by 2.3 per cent in real terms from the previous year’s cost of £58,661.
The average cost of keeping a woman in prison for a year, at £83,987, was significantly higher than the cost of detention in a male jail, at £55,560.
About three-quarters of prisoners are held in public-sector prisons. In the minority of jails which are run by private contractors on behalf of the Ministry of Justice, costs are lower – although the figures are calculated in different ways and are not directly comparable. In contracted prisons managed under Private Finance Initiative deals, the average cost per prisoner was £54,740 per year. In private-sector jails run under ‘manage and maintain’ arrangements, the average cost per prisoner per year was £36,658.
Across England and Wales, £4.9 billion of taxpayers’ money was spent keeping 87,000 people behind bars in 2024/25. A breakdown by individual prisons showed that among men’s public-sector jails, HMP Woodhill was the most expensive at £131,125 per prisoner per year, whilst HMP Littlehey was cheapest (£42,081). Among women’s public-sector prisons, HMP Askham Grange was the most expensive (£100,317) while HMP Drake Hall was cheapest (£62,895).
Keeping adults in custody was far cheaper than the per-person cost of jailing under-18s, who require much higher staff-prisoner ratios. The average cost of detaining a child aged 15 to 18 in a Young Offender Institution was £306,492 per year.
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