How we count

New Business Index: methodology

What counts

Every UK private limited company (Ltd) and limited liability partnership (LLP) newly incorporated at Companies House. Other types (PLCs, community interest companies registered as other types, limited partnerships, overseas entities, charities, sole traders) are not counted. We publish counts only: no company names, numbers, addresses or officers appear anywhere in the index.

Dates

All dates are incorporation dates as recorded by Companies House, not the date we found the company. A week ending 19 Oct 2026 means companies incorporated from 13 Oct 2026 to 19 Oct 2026 inclusive. Figures for the latest week can rise slightly as late records arrive.

Areas

Area comes from the registered office postcode district (for example LS1). Each district is assigned to the local authority district that holds most of its live postcodes in the ONS National Statistics Postcode Lookup (August 2026, Open Government Licence).

Council figures are estimates, matched from postcode districts using the ONS lookup; some districts cross council boundaries.

Counts are by registered office address, which is not always where a business trades. Areas with company-formation or registered-office providers may show higher numbers.

Companies whose postcode we can't match to an area are counted in the UK total only, so the regions add up to slightly less than the UK figure.

Industries

Industry groups are FreshlySpotted's own grouping of SIC 2007 codes, based on the first code each company lists. Holding companies and 'not stated / dormant' codes are shown separately.

Suppression

To make sure no single company can be identified, any count from 1 to 4 is shown as <5 on every page, chart and in the CSV. Week-on-week changes involving a suppressed figure are shown as n/a. Where the Ltd or LLP figure is under 5, the other one is also withheld (shown as 'hidden' on pages and n/a in the CSV), because otherwise it could be worked out from the total. In the CSV, every count from 1 to 4 is <5.

Known gaps

Known gap: the 1 October 2026 bulk file. Early weeks came from Companies House's monthly bulk snapshot (BasicCompanyData, dated 1 Oct 2026). That file actually stops at 30 September: it held 1 company for 1 October against 2,550 from the Companies House search API, so there is no bulk data for 1 October itself. From 12 September onwards counts come from the Companies House Advanced Search API, which covers 1 October fully. Weeks before 12 September rely on the snapshot only. Both sources list companies that were still active when we read them, so a company dissolved soon after incorporation can be missing, and older weeks may be slightly low.

Licence and reuse

Suggested citation: Source: FreshlySpotted New Business Index (NIMBUS LABS LTD), based on Companies House and ONS data (Open Government Licence v3.0).

Contains public sector information from Companies House, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026.

Contains Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right 2026.

You may reuse these figures with credit to FreshlySpotted (NIMBUS LABS LTD) and the sources above.

The Open Government Licence applies to the Companies House and ONS source data, not to FreshlySpotted's own figures, groupings or pages.

Download

Download the CSV (area-by-week counts). Spreadsheet of every area and week (opens in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets)

CSV preview

The first 5 rows of the file:

Counts are by registered office address, which is not always where a business trades. Areas with company-formation or registered-office providers may show higher numbers.

area_type

country, region or lad (local authority district, i.e. council)

area_code

ONS GSS code (K02000001 for the UK; blank for regions)

area_name

Area name

region

Region the council is in

week_ending

Last day of the 7-day week (YYYY-MM-DD, incorporation date)

ltd

New private limited companies

llp

New limited liability partnerships

total

Ltd + LLP

<5 means 1 to 4. n/a means withheld so a <5 figure can't be worked out. The last line of the file is the source credit.