With the 10th anniversary of the Brexit referendum vote come and gone, it is worthwhile to reflect on what has happened, trade-wise, in the United Kingdom since June 23, 2016.

First, after two and a half years of negotiations with the EU, the UK finally left the European single market and the customs union on January 31, 2020. The EU–UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) went into effect May 1, 2021, which allows goods to be sold between the UK and the EU markets without tariffs or quotas.

Secondly, since 2020, the UK has embarked on an extensive round of trade agreement negotiations with non-EU member states, several of these former colonies, such as Canada, Australia, and India, while other discussions have been with non-EU European countries, such as Norway, Liechtenstein, and Iceland. The UK also signed a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) with Japan in October 2020 and joined the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) bloc in 2024. In total, the UK has signed 40 trade agreements with 74 countries and territories as of June 2026.

A key take-away of these UK trade deals since 2020 is that leaving the EU was the easy part of Brexit. Building new relationships with the rest of the world, a core promise of the Leave campaign, has been the hard part for the UK.

The cost of leaving

When the British electorate voted to leave the EU in June 2016, few could have imagined that ten years later, British trade levels would be lower than they had been in 2015, not just with Europe but with the rest of the world.

According to a January 2025 study by the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), the EU TCA that the UK and the EU signed on December 30, 2020 reduced total goods exports from the UK by an estimated £27 billion (6.4%) in 2022, mostly due to a 13.2% fall in the value of goods exported to the EU.1 Much of this decline has been due to as many as 20,000 small-to-medium-sized British firms ceasing to sell abroad.2 Although the TCA avoided tariffs, it introduced several non-tariff barriers, including customs checks, rules of origin requirements, and sanitary and phytosanitary checks, all of which have increased costs for these UK exporters to the EU, which in turn, has reduced UK trade volumes.3

Another unexpected impact on British trade has been that increased trading costs have led to fewer high-productivity UK firms exporting, while smaller, less productive firms have given up on exporting and instead have shifted to selling domestically.4

Although the UK has tried to increase its trade with countries outside of Europe, so far, its exports to non-EU countries have not made up for the decline in British exports to the EU. In fact, the EU continues to be the UK's largest trading partner, and trade as a share of British GDP has fallen 12% since 2019, two and a half times more than in any other G7 country. The British Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has consistently estimated that UK trade will be approximately 15% lower than if the UK were still in the EU.5

The UK's 2021 Free-Trade Agreement with Australia, for instance, is estimated to raise British GDP by only .08% and the British government expects even less of its FTA with New Zealand, only an increase of .03% in GDP from trade with that country.6 The UK's joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) trade bloc in 2024 has not so far significantly increased British trade with Pacific Rim countries. And the CEPA with Japan has increased British GDP by a minimal amount (.07%), while preserving existing market access.7

Three kinds of deal

The right and ability to negotiate its own trade deals was a leading argument for Brexit. Therefore, it is worth looking at some of these UK trade agreements since 2020 and asking, how similar or different are they from the agreements the EU had with those countries? Did the UK achieve anything new in any of its post-Brexit trade deals?

Post-Brexit UK trade agreements can be classified into three categories:

  1. Continuity or "rollover" agreements — this is the largest category. Most of the UK agreements since 2020 have been copied from existing EU treaties with the goal of recreating the trade relationship the UK had with those countries before Brexit.
  2. New bilateral Free Trade Agreements. These were negotiated from scratch and are often with countries with which the UK has had a long relationship: former colonies and members of the Commonwealth of Nations.
  3. Structurally different negotiations and agreements. This is primarily seen with the UK deal with India.

Of the 40 trade deals the UK has signed since 2020, approximately 30 of these are continuity agreements, while only four are actually new agreements (with Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Korea). The CEPA with Japan is a hybrid of mostly continuity with some new meaningful differences particularly in the areas of digital trade, data governance, financial services, and supply chain rules. A Free Trade Agreement with India, signed in July 2025, marked a new approach in both negotiation and agreement for the UK but ultimately differed little in content from the deal that India signed with the EU in January 2026.8

Continuity agreements

The UK deals with Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein (the European Economic Area/European Free Trade Association states) are continuity-style agreements designed to maintain access to markets that had existed for the UK before Brexit.9

One of the most important continuity agreements the UK signed was the one with Canada, but it has been problematic in implementation. Pre-Brexit trade between the UK and Canada had been covered by Canada's Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with the EU. After Brexit, the UK and Canada made a temporary deal, the UK-Canada Trade Continuity Agreement, in 2021 that largely repeated the terms of the CETA, but which also called for a more comprehensive bilateral treaty to be negotiated at a to-be-determined future date. However, this continuity agreement also contained several time-limited clauses relevant to certain sectors, particularly dairy products and meats. These time limits expired in 2023, and the UK now faces a 245% Canadian tariff on British cheese. In response to the lack of progress in negotiations, the UK broke off talks with Canada in January 2024.10 As of June 2026, the UK and Canada still have not revived trade talks to resolve these significant barriers to trade.

New Free Trade Agreements

The UK-Australia FTA, signed in December 2021 and in effect on May 31, 2023, was the first fully new UK trade agreement after Brexit.11 This deal is more liberal from the UK perspective than the proposed agreement that the EU was also negotiating with Australia at the same time. The UK was more willing than the EU to liberalize agricultural imports from Australia, especially in regard to quotas on beef, access of Australian lamb to the UK market, and the phasing out of tariffs.12 The UK-New Zealand FTA was also more liberal than the agreement the EU concluded with New Zealand in June 2022.13

New agreement, new negotiation methods

India is the clearest case where the UK has pursued a meaningfully different strategy from the EU. The UK's Free Trade Agreement with India is its third largest after its agreements with Australia and Japan, and negotiations were concluded in July 2025. The UK was willing to make accommodations on mobility, visas, professional services, and phased tariff reductions where the EU had historically been more resistant in its negotiations with India.14

Despite these differences, for the most part, most of the UK trade deals post-Brexit are similar in content to the agreements negotiated by the EU with those countries. Thus, while leaving the EU was a dramatic step, economically and politically for the UK, the outcome so far ten years later in terms of trade volumes and GDP has been both minimal and expensive.

A key lesson of Brexit has been that trade is more than simply tariffs and quotas; the existence of regulation and bureaucracy in trade are themselves a significant cost. The decline in British trade volumes is the result of thousands of small-medium British firms ceasing to export because the regulatory costs under the TCA have simply become too high to make trade worth it.

Notes

  1. Rebecca Freeman, Marco Garofalo, Enrico Longoni, Kalina Manova, Rebecca Mari, Thomas Prayer, Thomas Sampson, "Deep Integration and trade: UK firms in the wake of Brexit," CEPR, 19 January 2025. cepr.org
  2. Dennis Novy, Thomas Sampson, Catherine Thomas, "Brexit and UK trade," Centre for Economic Performance Paper No. CEPEA058, June 2024. cep.lse.ac.uk
  3. Freeman, Garofalo, et al., "Deep Integration and trade: UK firms in the wake of Brexit," 19 January 2025, cepr.org; Thomas Sampson, "Brexit has been an economic failure," LSE British Politics and Policy Blog, 16 June 2026, blogs.lse.ac.uk
  4. David Milliken, "How Brexit is estimated to have hit the UK economy," Reuters, 17 June 2026, reuters.com; National Institute of Economic and Social Research, "Business Investment, Productivity and Brexit," 24 April 2025, niesr.ac.uk
  5. Office for Budget Responsibility, "How are our Brexit trade forecast assumptions performing?" March 2024. obr.uk
  6. UK-Australia Free Trade Agreement, House of Commons Library Research Briefing, 12 May 2023, commonslibrary.parliament.uk; UK-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement, House of Commons Library Research Briefing, 12 May 2023, commonslibrary.parliament.uk; T. Heron, G. Siles-Brügge, and D. McDonald, "Performing trade: 'Global Britain' and the UK's post-Brexit free trade agreements with Australia and New Zealand," Review of International Political Economy, 32(5), 2025, pp. 1468–1491, doi.org
  7. UK-Japan Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement, House of Commons Library Research Briefing, 23 November 2020. commonslibrary.parliament.uk
  8. UK Department for International Trade, "UK trade agreements in effect," updated 7 February 2025, gov.uk; David Eiser, Nicola McEwen, Graeme Roy, "The Trade Policies of Brexit Britain: The Influence of and Impacts on the Devolved Nations," European Review of International Studies 8 (2021), pp. 22–48, web.archive.org
  9. Agreement on Arrangements between Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and the UK following the Withdrawal of the UK from the EU, the EEA Agreement and other Agreements applicable between the UK and EEA EFTA States by virtue of the UK's Membership of the EU [TS No. 35/2025]. gov.uk
  10. Tom Edgington, "Trade deals: What has the UK done since Brexit?" BBC, 26 January 2024, bbc.com; Jack Simpson, "Post-Brexit trade deals: what's been agreed and what could still come?" The Guardian, 26 January 2024, theguardian.com
  11. UK Department for International Trade, "Impact assessment of the FTA between the UK and Australia: executive summary," updated 10 May 2022. gov.uk
  12. Philip Blenkinsop, "EU enters 'last mile' of trade deal negotiations with Australia," Reuters, 23 March 2026. reuters.com
  13. "New Zealand," European Commission, Trade and Economic Security. policy.trade.ec.europa.eu
  14. UK-India Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, 3 February 2026, publications.parliament.uk; "India," European Commission, Trade and Economic Security, policy.trade.ec.europa.eu