A plain-English glossary of the terms a gilt list uses — coupon, clean price, accrued interest, dirty price, yield and more — so each column name maps to a figure the page computes.
Why gilts have their own vocabulary
Gilt lists are dense on purpose: they pack a lot into a single row, and each column has a name that is familiar to a market professional and opaque to everyone else. This guide translates the terms, one column at a time, so a reader can point at any heading and know which figure it stands for and how the page works it out. Every explanation here mirrors the glossary the site carries, so the word a reader meets in the prose is the same word the tooltip uses.
The terms fall naturally into three groups: what the gilt costs, what it pays, and what that combination returns. Taking them in that order is easier than trying to hold every column at once.
The prices: clean price, accrued interest, dirty price
The clean price is the price of the gilt itself, before the interest built up since the last coupon. It is the figure the market quotes and the one a reader first thinks of as the price. Accrued interest is the interest built up since the last coupon, and the number of days it covers. The dirty price is the clean price plus the accrued interest — what a buyer actually pays. The three always stand in that order, and the first two add up to the third.
Two more terms belong with the prices. The index ratio applies to an index-linked gilt: it records how far prices have risen since the gilt was issued, and it scales the coupon and the redemption alike. The income per £100 is the annual coupon paid on £100 of face value. Neither is a price, but both sit near the price columns because they are read alongside them.
A few everyday words are worth naming too. Par means the £100 nominal a gilt repays, so a gilt priced below par is at a discount and one above it is at a premium. The nominal value is that same £100 per unit. None of these are judgements about a gilt; they are ways of saying where its price sits relative to the amount that will be repaid.
The income: coupon and income per £100
The coupon is the fixed interest paid each year, per £100 of nominal value. The income per £100 is the same thing expressed as the annual cash figure on £100. For a conventional gilt the two are constant for the gilt's life; for an index-linked gilt the coupon is a real rate and the cash income grows with the index ratio. Reading the cash figure against the price paid is what turns income into a return.
The returns: five yields worth telling apart
The word yield appears in several columns, and they are not interchangeable. Gross yield is the yield if you hold the gilt to maturity, with coupons reinvested at the same rate, compounded once a year. DMO yield is the same yield under the UK Debt Management Office's market convention: coupons twice a year, counted on actual days. Net redemption yield is the redemption yield after income tax on the coupons, compounded once a year like the gross yield.
For index-linked gilts the return is a real yield — the return after the inflation the gilt is priced for — and the annual inflation that its real and nominal yields imply is the impl. RPI. The Change column, labelled Since the previous close, shows how far a gilt's yield has moved since the prior session, which is the figure that turns a rising yield into a falling price.
A reference: term to figure
The table maps the most-read terms to the figure the page computes for each. It is a lookup, not a lesson: each row names the term, says what it means, and points at where it comes from.
| Term | What it means | Where it comes from |
| Coupon | The fixed interest paid each year on £100 nominal | The gilt's own terms |
| Clean price | The gilt's price before built-up interest | The market |
| Accrued interest | Interest built up since the last coupon | Days since the last coupon |
| Dirty price | Clean price plus accrued interest | The two added together |
| Gross yield | Return held to maturity, compounded yearly | Price, coupons and repayment |
| DMO yield | The same yield on the DMO convention | Price, coupons and repayment |
| Real yield | Return after the inflation the gilt is priced for | An index-linked gilt's flows |
Where the glossary lives on the site
Every annotated column header on the gilt list names a term the site explains, so a reader can reveal the plain-English sentence for a column without leaving the page. The Help and user guide covers how the pages work and how to read a row from end to end. Together they mean the jargon is always one tap away, rather than something a reader has to hold in their head.
The value of a shared glossary is consistency: the same term means the same figure wherever it appears, so a reader who learns what the dirty price is on one page can rely on it on the next. That is why the site keeps one explanation per term rather than a fresh sentence wherever the column appears.
A reader who wants to check their understanding can do it against any row: pick a gilt, find its clean price and its coupon, and follow the two definitions to see how the dirty price and the yield are built from them. The glossary is not a test, but it is a way to make a dense row legible one column at a time.
Background, not advice
This guide explains gilt vocabulary; it is general background, not investment, tax or legal advice for any reader's circumstances. Defining a term is not a view on any gilt, and the figures a real row carries come from the day's market data and the gilt's own record, which are the primary sources.