UK Startup Formation & Survival Index
A free, citable index of UK tech and software company formation and status, derived from the Companies House public register. Every figure here is real and reproducible. Data pulled 2026-07-15.
On the Companies House register as at 2026-07-15.
Up 16.4% on 2024 (58,012). The highest annual total in this series.
Active + dissolved since Companies House records began.
SIC codes covered: 62011, 62012, 62020, 62090, 63110, 63120, 58210, 58290. Source: Companies House Advanced Search API. Open Government Licence v3.0.
What this index measures
The index tracks two things: formation volume (how many UK tech companies are incorporated each quarter and year) and register status (how many are currently active versus dissolved). Formation data runs from 2015 to 2025 annually, and from 2020-Q1 to 2026-Q2 quarterly. Status data is a live snapshot from the Companies House Advanced Search API.
This index is designed for journalists, policy researchers and founders who need a free, methodologically transparent alternative to paywalled startup data providers. Every figure is derived from the same public Companies House data you can query yourself, and the pull script is documented and re-runnable.
Annual formation trends (2015 to 2025)
Count of all companies incorporating under tech/software SIC codes in each calendar year, regardless of current status. Source: Companies House Advanced Search API, incorporated_from/to filter. 2026 not shown (year in progress).
| Year | Tech company formations | Year-on-year change |
|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 35,547 | n/a |
| 2016 | 36,439 | +2.5% |
| 2017 | 40,099 | +10.0% |
| 2018 | 45,348 | +13.1% |
| 2019 | 44,136 | -2.7% |
| 2020 | 45,104 | +2.2% |
| 2021 | 45,189 | +0.2% |
| 2022 | 47,931 | +6.1% |
| 2023 | 59,401 | +23.9% |
| 2024 | 58,012 | -2.3% |
| 2025latest full year | 67,529 | +16.4% |
Note: these are formations (incorporations), not trading starts. A company is counted from its date of incorporation regardless of when or whether it began trading.
Quarterly incorporations and dissolutions (2020-Q1 to 2026-Q2)
New companies incorporated and companies dissolved per quarter. Net = incorporations minus dissolutions. Data covers 26 quarters.
| Quarter | Incorporations | Dissolutions | Net |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020-Q1 | 9,745 | 8,640 | +1,105 |
| 2020-Q2* | 10,957 | 892 | +10,065 |
| 2020-Q3 | 12,090 | 5,556 | +6,534 |
| 2020-Q4† | 12,312 | 14,469 | -2,157 |
| 2021-Q1† | 11,327 | 12,069 | -742 |
| 2021-Q2 | 10,169 | 9,352 | +817 |
| 2021-Q3 | 10,394 | 11,932 | -1,538 |
| 2021-Q4 | 13,299 | 11,094 | +2,205 |
| 2022-Q1 | 11,831 | 11,409 | +422 |
| 2022-Q2 | 12,105 | 11,389 | +716 |
| 2022-Q3 | 11,925 | 10,428 | +1,497 |
| 2022-Q4 | 12,070 | 8,280 | +3,790 |
| 2023-Q1 | 14,349 | 12,528 | +1,821 |
| 2023-Q2 | 14,408 | 13,900 | +508 |
| 2023-Q3 | 15,248 | 10,915 | +4,333 |
| 2023-Q4 | 15,396 | 11,079 | +4,317 |
| 2024-Q1 | 17,152 | 10,796 | +6,356 |
| 2024-Q2 | 14,599 | 11,409 | +3,190 |
| 2024-Q3 | 13,350 | 12,036 | +1,314 |
| 2024-Q4 | 12,911 | 14,138 | -1,227 |
| 2025-Q1 | 15,211 | 13,026 | +2,185 |
| 2025-Q2 | 16,866 | 13,615 | +3,251 |
| 2025-Q3 | 18,533 | 17,072 | +1,461 |
| 2025-Q4 | 16,919 | 13,293 | +3,626 |
| 2026-Q1 | 19,288 | 14,952 | +6,336 |
| 2026-Q2 | 21,364 | 12,317 | +9,047 |
* 2020-Q2: strike-off suspended (see anomaly note above). † 2020-Q4 / 2021-Q1: backlog clearance.
Sub-sector breakdown by SIC group
Current active and dissolved counts by SIC code group. Combined totals are lower than the sum of individual groups because Companies House deduplicates companies that list multiple SIC codes.
| SIC code | Description | Active | Dissolved (all-time) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 62011 | Ready-made interactive leisure and entertainment software development | 10,954 | 14,840 |
| 62012 | Business and domestic software development | 115,021 | 94,781 |
| 62020 | Information technology consultancy activities | 172,998 | 235,308 |
| 62090 | Other information technology service activities | 97,664 | 119,387 |
| 63110 | Data processing, hosting and related activities | 22,507 | 25,000 |
| 63120 | Web portals | 22,968 | 29,511 |
| 58210 | Publishing of computer games | 4,856 | 5,743 |
| 58290 | Other software publishing | 18,529 | 17,954 |
| Combined | (deduped by CH; lower than column sums) | 359,507 | 458,213 |
Source: Companies House SIC code list and Advanced Search API. Snapshot as at 2026-07-15.
Register status snapshot
Cross-sectional snapshot as at 2026-07-15. See framing note above before citing.
Status “active” per Companies House. This includes dormant companies, shell companies and companies that have not yet started trading.
Includes voluntary strike-offs (e.g. members’ voluntary liquidations by profitable founders), not only failures. Dissolved does not equal failed.
Why the 44% figure should carry caveats:
- A company with “active” status is not necessarily trading. Dormant companies, holding companies and shell vehicles all count as active on the register.
- The dissolved count includes members’ voluntary liquidations, a common and tax-efficient exit route for profitable founders. It is not a pure measure of failures or closures.
- SIC codes are self-reported by directors. Many non-tech businesses register under tech codes, and many genuine tech companies use non-standard codes.
- The snapshot rate changes every month as new companies form and old ones dissolve. It is a point-in-time reading, not a stable rate.
Cohort survival curves (forthcoming)
A cohort survival curve would answer the question “of UK tech companies incorporated in 2019, what percentage are still active today?” This requires time-series archiving of the Companies House snapshot: by diffing monthly snapshots, it is possible to track when each cohort company left the register. Snapshot archiving started with this v1 pull on 2026-07-15. Cohort survival curves for prior years (derived from API sampling of company numbers) will be added in a future release when enough archived snapshots are available to validate the methodology. This section will be updated transparently. No estimated survival rates are stated here in advance of real data.
If you are a researcher or journalist who wants to run the cohort survival analysis on the archived data, see the methodology section for the re-run instructions and data licence.
Methodology and honest limitations
Source
All figures are live hit-counts from the Companies House Advanced Search API (Open Government Licence v3.0), pulled 2026-07-15. No third-party data sources are used. SIC code definitions from the Companies House SIC code list.
SIC codes included
62011 (leisure/entertainment software development), 62012 (business and domestic software development), 62020 (IT consultancy), 62090 (other IT services), 63110 (data processing and hosting), 63120 (web portals), 58210 (computer games publishing), 58290 (other software publishing). A company is in-scope if any of its registered SIC codes falls in this set. CH deduplicates companies that list multiple in-scope SIC codes, so the combined total is correct to use rather than summing per-SIC counts.
Related research
For long-run cohort survival curves (what share of each birth-year cohort is still trading after 1 to 5 years), see the UK Tech Startup Survival Curves. For the monthly software-company formation trend and seasonality, see the UK Tech Formations Index.
Formation counts
Count of all incorporations under the above SIC codes per quarter (incorporated_from / incorporated_to filter on the CH Advanced Search API) with no company_status restriction. This counts all companies ever incorporated in that window, regardless of whether they are currently active, dissolved or otherwise. Annual figures use calendar-year windows.
Active / dissolved totals
Single combined API query with all 8 SIC codes and company_status=active or company_status=dissolved. The combined total is a deduplicated count; it is lower than the sum of per-SIC counts.
Honest limitations
- Snapshot, not cohort survival. The active/dissolved ratio (44% active as at 2026-07-15) is a cross-sectional snapshot of all companies ever incorporated under these SIC codes. It is not a cohort survival rate. A company incorporated in 2024 has had far less time to fail than one incorporated in 2010. Cite it as a snapshot rate with this caveat, never as “X% of tech startups survive.”
- SIC self-reporting noise. SIC codes are chosen by directors at incorporation. Many IT-services companies register under 62020 (IT consultancy) regardless of their actual activity, including agencies, freelancers and non-tech businesses run through a limited company. The figures include a tail of companies whose primary activity is not technology.
- Dissolved does not mean failed. The dissolved count includes members’ voluntary liquidations (a common, tax-efficient exit for profitable founders), dormant shell companies struck off for non-filing, genuine failures, and companies that changed SIC code and were re-registered under a different code.
- 2020-Q2 strike-off suspension anomaly. Companies House suspended compulsory strike-off actions under the Corporate Insolvency and Governance Act 2020 from April to September 2020. 2020-Q2 shows only 892 dissolutions versus a typical 8,000 to 14,000 per quarter. The backlog cleared in 2020-Q4 and 2021-Q1, which are correspondingly elevated. All three quarters should be excluded from trend analysis.
- Dormant is not trading. “Active” status on Companies House means the company has not been struck off or dissolved. It includes dormant companies that have filed dormant accounts and have no trading activity.
- UK-wide, no regional split in v1. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are all included. The Companies House Advanced Search API does not support postcode-based filtering in combination with SIC and date filters at the hit-count level. A regional breakdown will be added when bulk-download diffing allows postcode-based aggregation.
- Sole traders and partnerships excluded. Companies House covers incorporated companies only. Freelance developers and unincorporated partnerships are invisible in this dataset.
Re-running the pull
The pull script is at startups-tech/pipeline/pull_ch_startup_index.py in the public repository. It requires a Companies House API key (free, from developer.company-information.service.gov.uk) and takes approximately two minutes. Output is written to the same JSON file that powers this page.
Sources and how to cite
Primary source
Companies House Advanced Search API. Publisher: Companies House (executive agency of the Department for Business and Trade). Licence: Open Government Licence v3.0. Data pulled 2026-07-15.
SIC code reference
Companies House SIC code list. Licence: Open Government Licence v3.0.
Cite this index as
UK Startup Formation and Survival Index, derived from Companies House Advanced Search API (SIC codes 62011/62012/62020/62090/63110/63120/58210/58290). Published under OGL3. Data pulled 2026-07-15.
Licence
Open Government Licence v3.0 (OGL3). Derived from Companies House public register. Reuse with attribution.
Last updated: 2026-07-15.
Planning your UK tech company?
67,529 UK tech companies incorporated in 2025. Getting the structure and compliance right from day one is what separates the ones that stay active. See our guides for founders at different stages.