National Accounts Committee Puts FY26 GDP Growth at 3.65 Percent as the Final Quarter Slows to 2 Percent, Economy Reaches $450.4 Billion

ISLAMABAD: GDP growth revised down to 3.65 percent — that is the National Accounts Committee’s final word on the fiscal year that ended in June. At its 118th meeting at the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics on Monday, the committee trimmed the FY26 estimate from the 3.70 percent it had approved in May. It is still the fastest annual pace in four years. The problem sits in the last quarter.

Why the final quarter lost speed

Growth in the April-to-June quarter came in at just 2 percent, against 6.07 percent in the same period a year earlier — the weakest reading in six quarters. Industrial activity contracted 4.7 percent in the quarter, and output in electricity, gas and water supply fell 33.2 percent. Much of that drop is arithmetic rather than collapse: a year ago the same segment had grown about 123 percent after the methodology was adjusted to capture solar power, leaving an unusually high base to be measured against. Even so, the utilities segment shrank 10.24 percent over the full year, and it dragged on industry throughout.

Winners and losers in the revision

Agriculture did better than first thought, revised up from 2.89 to 3.50 percent, while industry eased from 3.51 to 3.34 percent and services from 4.09 to 3.81 percent. Large-scale manufacturing slowed from 6.11 to 5.01 percent, though automobiles surged 57.77 percent, construction grew 6.30 percent and mining and quarrying improved to 1.52 percent. On the other side of the ledger, pharmaceuticals contracted 8.87 percent and iron and steel products 7.84 percent.

The size of the economy, and what forecasters expected

The committee put the size of the economy at Rs126.4 trillion, or $450.4 billion, with per capita income of Rs531,897, or $1,896. Growth for FY25 was also revised down, from 3.18 to 3.11 percent. The new FY26 figure sits close to the IMF’s 3.6 percent projection and the 3.7 percent expected by both the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, but it fell short of the State Bank of Pakistan’s projected range of 3.75 to 4.75 percent. The open question for the new fiscal year is whether the fourth-quarter slowdown was a statistical shadow — or the start of a trend.