Population
Every figure counts companies of type ltd — private companies limited by shares. Other legal forms are excluded: LLPs, community interest companies, companies limited by guarantee, limited partnerships, registered societies, PLCs and overseas entities. Each company is counted once, identified by its company number; deduplication is never done on name or address.
No current-status restriction is applied. A company is counted for the month it was incorporated in, whatever has happened to it since — applying a status filter would make the figures depend on when they were computed, and the two Companies House sources use different status vocabularies.
Window
Statistics cover complete calendar months only; a month is never published while it is still running. Each release reports the latest complete month, the rolling 12 months ending with it, the previous rolling 12 months for comparison, and a 24-month monthly series. Until a page's single-source history reaches 24 complete months, that page does not exist as a public URL at all — there is no thin placeholder for a page whose data is not ready.
The live early-stage stock measure
Alongside the monthly flow, each location and industry page carries one point-in-time figure: how many private limited companies are currently within 24 months of incorporation and still on the register, and that count as a share of the area's or sector's live private limited population. It is the measure that makes this Company Statistics rather than new-incorporation statistics — it counts the companies that exist now, not those formed in a month.
It is a stock, not a series. It is labelled "as at" a single date — the date of the Companies House bulk snapshot it is read from — and is never plotted over time, because a series of stock values would need a series of snapshots that are not retained. "Still on the register" is established from the snapshot's own membership, not from a stored status field: the register is exactly the set of companies the snapshot contains. It is never mixed with the flow figures in one chart or one total, because the two measure different things against different denominators.
The same caveats apply, and one is worth repeating: still being on the register is not the same as actively trading, and a registered office is not a trading location.
Sources
The monthly incorporation series (flow) is drawn from Companies House advanced search, one incorporation day at a time, because it records what was on the register on the day — including companies since dissolved. The live early-stage stock measure uses the Companies House monthly bulk snapshot, whose membership is the current register.
A single series never mixes the two. A historical month drawn from the bulk snapshot is missing every company incorporated in that month and dissolved since, a loss that grows with the age of the month — so a bulk-derived series slopes upward towards the present for a reason unrelated to company formation. The size of that effect is documented but not yet measured; until it is, this page claims only the direction of the bias, not its magnitude, and the bias is avoided rather than corrected.
Geography
Registered-office postcodes are mapped to official local-authority districts using the ONS Postcode Directory, from the full postcode, never a partial one. A published place is a fixed set of official GSS codes under geography version lr-geography-v1 — never a name, a postcode prefix or a locality match. Where ONSPD gives a pseudo-code, the record is counted as unmapped and reported as its own figure, never assigned to a neighbouring authority. Channel Islands and Isle of Man postcodes have no UK local authority and are always unmapped. One directory version is pinned for the whole window, because a monthly series is not comparable across a local-government reorganisation.
What a registered office is, and what it is not
A registered office is the statutory address for correspondence with Companies House. It is not necessarily where the business operates, where anyone works, or where any activity happens — a large share of registered offices are accountants', formation agents' and virtual-office addresses. Where a large share of a place's incorporations use one address, that concentration is shown as a percentage and a distinct-address count. The address on record is the current one, not the one at incorporation, and companies tend to move towards agent addresses over their first years, so the attribution drifts in a consistent direction. We do not correct for either; both are stated.
Address concentration
Location pages show what share of the 12-month count sits at the single most-used and the ten most-used normalised registered-office addresses, and the number of distinct addresses. A share at or above 15% at one address, or 40% across the top ten, is flagged as a prominent review note on the page — because at that level "companies registered here" and "businesses operating here" are materially different claims. The shares and the distinct-address count are published; no address is ever shown.
Industry
Companies House records up to four SIC 2007 codes per company. The ten published industry groups are a Launch Register editorial mapping under version sic2007-lr-v1 — not official SIC sections. The full list of five-digit codes in each group is published, so any figure can be reproduced. A company is counted on a group's page if any of its filed codes is in that group, so a company can appear in more than one group and group totals are not additive; they are never presented as a partition or a pie chart. The codes 99999 (dormant), 74990 (non-trading) and companies with no SIC code filed are excluded from every group and reported as their own counts.
Suppression
A cell counting between 1 and 9 companies is displayed as <10. No percentage, share, rank or chart point is derived from a suppressed number, whether it appears as the top or the bottom of a fraction. A suppressed month is a gap in a chart, never a zero — plotting it as zero would show something that did not happen.
Exclusions, in one list
- company types other than ltd;
- incomplete calendar months;
- records whose postcode cannot be mapped to a UK local authority — counted and reported, never reassigned;
- the codes 99999, 74990 and unfiled SIC codes, for industry-group membership only — counted and reported;
- for the flow series, the bulk snapshot as a source.
Nothing else is excluded. In particular no company is excluded for being dissolved, struck off, or proposed for striking off.
How figures are produced
Every count, share, ranking, chart point and eligibility decision is computed in code from a stored data set, deterministically. The commentary on each page is drawn from a fixed set of sentence templates chosen by the numbers. No language model calculates any figure on this site, selects any finding, writes any causal explanation, or decides whether a page is published. Published pages are served from a precomputed snapshot; a visitor's request never queries the company data and never contacts Companies House.
Revision policy
The library refreshes monthly, on or after the 10th. A refresh is all or nothing: if validation fails, the previous good snapshot stays published and a partial refresh is never released. Evergreen pages are updated in place; where a figure changes because the method changed rather than the data, the page says so. A page is published only by a validated snapshot passing its own gate — there is no manual route to publish a page whose gate has not passed.
What these figures do not tell you
- An incorporation is not a business opening. It is a registration.
- A registered office is not a place of business.
- A filed SIC code is not evidence of activity, qualification or professional registration.
- These figures do not explain why a count changed. A change is reported as a change.
- This is not a company directory. No company name, number, registered address or officer appears anywhere in this library.