The inclusive and fiducial $$t\bar{t}$$ production cross-sections are measured in the lepton+jets channel using $$20.2~\hbox {fb}^{-1}$$ of proton–proton collision data at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV recorded with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. Major systematic uncertainties due to the modelling of the jet energy scale and b-tagging efficiency are constrained by separating selected events into three disjoint regions. In order to reduce systematic uncertainties in the most important background, the $$W \text {+\,jets}$$ process is modelled using $$Z$$ + jets events in a data-driven approach. The inclusive $$t\bar{t}$$ cross-section is measured with a precision of 5.7% to be $$\sigma _{\text {inc}}(t\bar{t}) = 248.3 \pm 0.7 \, ({\mathrm {stat.}}) \pm 13.4 \, ({\mathrm {syst.}}) \pm 4.7 \, ({\mathrm {lumi.}})~\text {pb}$$ , assuming a top-quark mass of 172.5 GeV. The result is in agreement with the Standard Model prediction. The cross-section is also measured in a phase space close to that of the selected data. The fiducial cross-section is $$\sigma _{\text {fid}}(t\bar{t}) = 48.8 \pm 0.1 \, ({\mathrm {stat.}}) \pm 2.0 \, ({\mathrm {syst.}}) \pm 0.9 \, ({\mathrm {lumi.}})~\text {pb}$$ with a precision of 4.5%.