Every figure below was counted from the Companies House public register by our own ingester, covering 28 July to 12 August 2026 inclusive — 16 consecutive days. Total: 34,747 new incorporations. Nothing here is an estimate or a rolling-average projection, and where the data is weak we say so rather than smoothing it.
The daily rate is a weekday rate
"How many companies are formed in the UK each day" has two honest answers, because the register barely moves at weekends.
- Weekdays: 2,766 per day (33,190 across 12 weekdays)
- Weekends: 389 per day (1,557 across 4 weekend days)
- All days averaged together: 2,172 per day
Broken down by day of week, averaged over the days of each in the window:
- Monday — 3,266/day
- Tuesday — 2,947/day
- Wednesday — 2,539/day
- Thursday — 2,557/day
- Friday — 2,543/day
- Saturday — 370/day
- Sunday — 409/day
Monday is the heaviest day and it is not close: a Monday carries roughly 29% more new companies than a Wednesday. Sixteen days is two Mondays, so treat the exact gap as indicative rather than settled — but the weekday/weekend split is 33,190 against 1,557 and no amount of extra sampling is going to reverse that.
Why this matters if you prospect new companies: a weekly list pulled on a Monday morning is mostly Friday-and-weekend formations, which is the thinnest slice of the week. Pull on a Tuesday and you capture Monday's peak while it is a day old.
96.7% are ordinary private limited companies
Company type, all 34,747:
- ltd (private limited by shares) — 33,586 (96.7%)
- private limited by guarantee, no share capital — 872 (2.5%)
- LLP — 134
- limited partnership — 60
- registered overseas entity — 34
- private unlimited — 14
- PLC — 12
If you are building a prospecting filter, the practical read is that filtering to ltd costs you about 3% of the register and removes almost all of the structures you were not going to sell to anyway. Twelve PLCs in 16 days is a reminder of how top-heavy the coverage of UK business news is relative to what actually gets incorporated.
Two central London postcode areas account for 11.3% of the whole country
Postcode area of the registered office, top 15 (34,729 of 34,747 records carried a parseable postcode):
- EC — 2,092 (6.0%)
- WC — 1,839 (5.3%)
- E — 1,483
- B (Birmingham) — 1,172
- W — 1,130
- M (Manchester) — 1,021
- N — 966
- SE — 594
- HA (Harrow) — 586
- SW — 576
- G (Glasgow) — 551
- IP (Ipswich) — 539
- LE (Leicester) — 484
- CV (Coventry) — 457
- NW — 454
EC and WC together are 3,931 companies, 11.3% of every company formed in the UK in those 16 days. The eight London postcode areas in that list total 9,134 — 26.3% of the national figure.
Read that number carefully, because it is the most misleading one on this page. A registered office in EC1 or WC1 very often belongs to a formation agent or a virtual-office provider, not to a business that has ever had a desk there. That is why a postcode-only filter behaves badly in central London and reasonably well in Leicester: in LE the address is far more likely to be where the work happens. Two things follow if you prospect from the register:
- In EC/WC/W1, treat the postcode as a weak signal and lean on SIC code, company name and officer address instead.
- Outside London, the postcode is a much stronger proxy for "local business I could actually visit", and a tighter radius costs you less than you would think.
The top SIC codes are not what the business press implies
Share of the 34,517 companies that recorded at least one SIC code (a company can record more than one, so these do not sum to 100%):
- 47910 Retail sale via mail order houses or via Internet — 3,662 (10.6%)
- 68209 Other letting and operating of own or leased real estate — 2,558 (7.4%)
- 62012 Business and domestic software development — 2,202 (6.4%)
- 70229 Management consultancy activities other than financial management — 2,162 (6.3%)
- 68100 Buying and selling of own real estate — 1,639 (4.8%)
- 62020 Information technology consultancy activities — 1,333 (3.9%)
- 64209 Activities of other holding companies — 971 (2.8%)
- 56103 Take-away food shops and mobile food stands — 910 (2.6%)
- 62090 Other information technology and computer service activities — 837 (2.4%)
- 82990 Other business support service activities — 829 (2.4%)
- 41202 Construction of domestic buildings — 772 (2.2%)
- 85590 Other education — 724 (2.1%)
- 68320 Management of real estate on a fee or contract basis — 714 (2.1%)
- 73110 Advertising agencies — 707 (2.0%)
Three observations an accountant can act on:
- One code in ten is online retail. 47910 is the single largest category in the country by a wide margin, and it is also the code a founder picks when they are not sure what else to put. Expect a high proportion of dormant-in-practice companies here, and price accordingly.
- Property is the largest real sector, not tech. Add 68209, 68100 and 68320 and you get 4,911 companies — 14.2%, ahead of the software/IT block (62012, 62020, 62090) at 4,372, or 12.7%. If you have any property-specific capability — SPV structures, s24 questions, ATED — the register produces roughly 300 new potential clients a day for it.
- Take-away food shops out-form advertising agencies. 910 against 707, and domestic construction (772) beats both. The long tail of the register is small local trades, which is where a high-street practice's realistic pipeline actually lives.
What we are not claiming
Being straight about the limits of a 16-day window:
- No seasonality. Late July and early August sit inside the UK holiday period. This is not an annualisable figure — multiplying 2,766 by 250 working days is your extrapolation, not our finding.
- Day-of-week averages rest on 2–3 samples each. The weekday/weekend gap is solid; the Monday-versus-Wednesday gap needs more weeks before we would defend the exact percentage.
- We did not de-duplicate formation agents. A single agent's address can appear hundreds of times in the EC/WC counts and it is counted every time, exactly as the register records it.
- The country field is unusable and we left it out. 17,858 records say "England" and 14,710 say "United Kingdom" for the same free-text field, so any England-versus-UK split from it would be an artefact of how each filing was typed in.
Where the data comes from
Companies House publishes new incorporations on its public register and its streaming API. Formation Alert ingests them continuously and sends UK accountants a weekly digest filtered to their own postcode areas and SIC codes, so you get the 20–60 companies that match your practice instead of 2,766 a day that mostly do not. It is £49/month, and you can see a real sample list for your own area before paying anything.
If you want the numbers above recomputed for one specific postcode area, that is a question our own data answers in a second — start with a sample for your area.