Data on businesses in the United Kingdom

Official market statistics

• Businesses by nation and region 2026VAT and PAYE registered businesses, local units and legal status in England’s nine regions, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
• Business births, deaths and survival 2019–2024New and closed businesses per year, birth and death rates and how many new businesses are still trading after one to five years.
• The Companies House register in figuresLive companies on the register by status, company type and industry, counted from the free Companies House snapshot.

Where the figures come from

The pages use official figures: the ONS publication UK business: activity, size and location 2026, the ONS business demography reference tables 2024 and the free Companies House snapshot of live companies. We downloaded the files ourselves on 4 November 2026 and used the published values; our own values are only simple calculations from them (shares and rates). ONS datasets are published under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

These are not figures from our dataset. They describe how many businesses exist, not how many of them would be included in an export from Contact Database or have a phone number. The status of our dataset is shown on the database status page; we state the scope of a specific selection in the quote.

What applies to all analyses

• Registered businesses are counted. The ONS counts businesses registered for VAT and/or PAYE on its Inter-Departmental Business Register. Very small sole traders below the VAT threshold and without employees are not included.
• Businesses and local units. A business can have several local units (sites). In March 2026 there were 2 786 985 businesses and 3 232 415 local units; each page states what is counted.
• Rounded values. The ONS rounds every published cell to the nearest 5 to protect confidentiality, so totals across tables can differ slightly.
• Register is not activity. Companies House counts live companies, including dormant ones and companies with a proposal to strike off; the ONS counts trading businesses. The two figures measure different things.
• We do not interpret causes. The tables show levels and differences. Why a region or an industry performs differently cannot be read from them alone.

Using the figures

You may reuse the figures with attribution. Please cite the official source (ONS or Companies House) with table and date; each page contains a citation template. If you need a figure for a particular industry or region that is missing here, write to info@contactdatabase.co.uk.