There are 5,695,465 companies alive on the UK register today. We read all of it — every filing, every balance sheet, every charge — and some of what it says surprised even us. Eight facts, counted from the raw data on 12 August 2026.
The 2025 cohort still on the register: 752,951 companies — about 2,060 a day, more than double the 2022 intake (330k). 2026 is running at the same pace. Whatever else is said about the economy, the rate of company creation has never been higher.
45% of live companies are under 5 years old. Just 8,008 of 5.7 million have passed 100 years. The oldest — the Goldsmiths' guild of the City of London — has been on the record since 1327, incorporated before the Black Death.
71–75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden — a virtual-office address — is the registered home of 128,080 companies. The entire city of Manchester: 112,013. London holds one in five UK companies overall; the top eight hub addresses "house" some 408,000 between them.
303,484 live companies — 22.6% of those filing balance sheets — report negative net assets. Technically insolvent, still trading. Most will muddle through; some won't. Telling the two apart is the entire game — in credit, in M&A, in supply chains.
Micro-entity and small-company filing regimes keep 98% of P&Ls off the public record. What can't be hidden is the balance sheet: together the SMEs we track hold £270 billion in cash, while the median company keeps just £18k. (We estimate turnover and headcount for every company anyway — that's a story for another post.)
Across 1.1M companies where the owner's age is on record, 31.5% of owners are 60 or older; 27,524 are past 80, and 2,944 past 90 — still signing the accounts every year. The largest ownership handover in British business history isn't coming. It's already running.
Companies forced into compulsory liquidation die at 8.4 years old on average. Creditors' voluntary liquidation comes at 11.3. Administration — the procedure that tries to save the business — at 17.2. The young are let go; the old get rescued.
The register of charges is a map of who lends to whom: Barclays alone secures lending to 23,484 companies, Lloyds to 19,366, HSBC's two entities to 32,065 combined — and behind the high-street names, a long tail of specialist lenders whose books tell you where credit appetite actually sits.
The register knows more than it tells. Scout reads all of it — 1.5M owner-led UK companies, scored against 17.7M company-years of history, re-scored live as filings land. Which will sell, which will borrow, which are quietly running out of road: see the whole register moving, or start free.