Was the pre-Christmas boom in home improvements a sign of better fortunes for 2026 or simply a release of pent-up demand? Danny Williams gives us his take on the unusual seasonal upturn.

Just when most of us had resigned ourselves to writing 2025 off, the industry has enjoyed a sales surge of almost post Covid proportions

From October through to early December, we were flooded with orders, something that appears to have been industry wide. Quotes turned into orders. Order books filled and after a year of flat trading, fragile confidence and customers finding ever more inventive reasons to wait, the UK window and door market suddenly remembered how to breathe.

So what changed? Because it certainly wasn’t government policy.

This wasn’t a boom — it was a release

Let’s be clear. This was not a sudden surge of optimism about the UK economy. Homeowners haven’t woken up believing everything is fine and the future is rosy.

What I believe we have seen is a release of pent-up home improvement ambitions, of homeowners frustrated by the political, social and economic strife that, even for the most news-shy amongst us, cannot help but permeate through. There has been little to celebrate.

All year long, people have been sitting on decisions, waiting for inflation to fall, for interest rates to stabilise and what their mortgage reset would look like.

I have always said that homeowners just need an excuse to throw cash at their castles, something that I was particularly adept at doing when I was on the knocker all those years ago. Even for those that have the readies, for reasons even they cannot fully understand, caution has ruled.

But by October, many people knew what their new mortgage payment was and that energy bills weren’t going back to 2022 levels. And crucially, they knew things probably weren’t about to get dramatically worse. Of for that matter, any better.

In other words, I truly believe that people just thought: sod it, I want my new windows and doors, I am fed up with all the doom and gloom.

And that’s when the logjam broke.

Christmas mattered

Christmas spending was better than expected in several sectors. Not reckless, not extravagant – but confident enough. Once people gave themselves permission to spend on Christmas, the psychological handbrake came off on other things including home improvements thank fully.

Of course, the usual drivers, especially fuel bills and comfort and doing the place up before the rellies turn up were also factors. And perhaps we should give credit to installers who were pushing hard for business after a slow 2025, pushing hard to fit before Christmas, all of which produced a perfect storm for a short, sharp uplift.

So what does this mean for early 2026?

Such was demand, many retailers have carried work over into January and perhaps longer. This will make the first quarter strong. But just as the post Covid beano disappeared as soon as it began, we shouldn’t kid ourselves.

This surge does not mean demand has suddenly reset to pre-2022 levels. It means a backlog of postponed decisions was released in a narrow window.

We must assume that the bunch of numpties running the country will continue to use outdated, discredited dogma and tea leaves to make their decisions, with political infighting likely to bring further disruption and lunacy to government rather than anything that might bring relief and even encouragement to universally constrained businesses/employers.

If government continues to treat business as a political inconvenience rather than an economic engine, then confidence will remain fragile and the highest unemployment figures for five years must surely convince even the daftest of politicians that ‘Labour isn’t working’ to revive the headline that saw Maggie installed as PM back in 1978.

At the risk of being a New Year Grinch, we must enjoy this welcome uplift in sales whilst also understanding that all of the elements that have dampened the market, remain. But whilst it wasn’t proof the market is fixed, neither is it broken beyond repair.

People still want to improve their homes. They still value comfort, efficiency and security. But they need clarity, stability and a sense that working hard actually gets rewarded.

And I am encouraged that homeowners took the attitude that ‘sod it, let’s have a spree to end the misery’. Now the challenge is to offer the products, service and incentives that can tap into this mindset, whenever it surfaces.