Office for National Statistics (via Nomis)
UK Business Counts & Business Demography
How many businesses there are in every local authority, broken down by industry, employee size band and legal form — plus how many start up, close down and survive each year. The official denominator for sizing a market or a sales patch.
At a glance
- Publisher
- Office for National Statistics (via Nomis)
- Updates
- Updated annually
- Cost
- Free — open data
- Last checked
- 2026-07-16
Professional & B2B servicesFinancial servicesLogisticsConstruction & tradesEnergyBusiness & companies
What your business can use it for
- Territory planningSize each sales patch before you commit a rep to it: how many businesses of the right sector and size actually sit in that area.
- Market analysisPut a number on your addressable market — nationally, regionally or per local authority — and see which sectors are growing or shrinking.
- Site selectionFor B2B businesses, pick locations by the density of your customer type nearby rather than by consumer footfall.
Works with data you already have
- Your patch, territory or delivery-area postcodesPostcodesCounts are published at local-authority grain; map your postcodes to LAD with the free ONS postcode lookup, then join on GEOGRAPHY_CODE
- The industries you sell intoIndustry codes (SIC)INDUSTRY_CODE is 5-digit SIC 2007 — the same coding the UK Company Register uses, so the two line up after string normalisation
How to get it
- Nomis — UK Business Counts (IDBR) as CSV or APIAPINo account needed. Pick your geography, industries and size bands in the browser, or pull the same cut from the API. 25,000 rows per call.
- ONS Business Demography — births, deaths and survival ratesBulk downloadA single Excel workbook per year: new businesses, closures, active counts and 1–5 year survival by local authority and industry.
- ONS SIC 2007 industry hierarchy (reference)Bulk downloadThe authoritative structure for rolling 5-digit industry codes up to sectors — needed to make sense of either dataset.
What's involved in using it
- The industry labels bundle the code and the description into one field (like "01110 : Growing of cereals"), so before you can filter to your own sector someone has to split them apart first.
- It counts individual workplaces, not companies — a business with ten branches is counted ten times — so headline totals overstate the number of firms unless you know to adjust for it.
- The figures are organised by council-area codes, not by postcode, so you need a free postcode-to-area lookup to line them up against your own customer or site list.
The technical detail, for whoever sets it up (5)
- Business Counts counts local units; Business Demography counts the companies themselves, which is why the two never agree.
- Local authority is the finest geography published openly.
- Cells with fewer than five businesses are rounded or suppressed to protect confidentiality, so small slices are approximate.
- The boundaries used are the April 2023 local authorities — check they match whatever else you are joining to.
- The Nomis CSVs are Windows-1252 encoded, not UTF-8, and will fail to load as UTF-8 on accented place names.
Ask us about UK Business Counts & Business Demography
Ask a factual question about UK Business Counts & Business Demography — what it covers, how often it changes, whether it matches the records you keep — and we will answer, free. Or tell us what you are trying to work out, and we will tell you what it would take to get this data working next to the numbers you already have.