The Business Census dataset contains information on companies registered in the UK. The data are provided by Fusion Data Science, producing a database since May 2012 to provide a history of company formations, dissolutions and other events that are hidden in normal monthly snapshots. The GeoDS then prepares annual "Census" snapshots of the data, showing the state of all businesses at 31 March of each year.
The database contains all 10+ million companies, and other corporate entities, which have existed since that time rather than the ~5 million contained in the Companies House data snapshots. More details can be found at the Companies House website (https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/companies-house ).
These data are available at address level and are supplied as 26 zipped CSV files.
Content
These data are provided in a series of annual snapshots (13, from 2012 to 2024 inclusive) of the companies present as of 31 March of a particular year in a flattened file (except their SIC codes which are as of 1 April of the year), and as 13 entity type files (across all years). Annual snapshots of the data record, The entity type files have the Company table as the central table and the rest linked to the company table via companyID:
- business_census20[12..24] - 13 files
- Accounts
- CompanyCategory
- Company
- CompanyName
- CompanyStatus
- ConfirmationStatements
- LimitedPartnerships
- Mortgages
- ONSGeography
- Postcodes
- RegAddress
- Returns
- SICCodes
This is the Version 11a release - mid-2024. Changes from version 11:
- Snapshot date is 31 March rather than 30 March.
- SIC codes are as of 1 April rather than 31 March, to cover companies incorporated the previous month. Note that prior to July 2016, SIC codes for newly incorporated companies could be supplied up to two years after incorporation. This means many new companies for these earlier censuses do not list SIC codes. They likely do appear in later censuses for such companies, typically up to month after incorporation date.
Some pre-May-2012 data can also be included on request, but they may be missing some fields, values, and are not in an annual snapshot format.
For detailed descriptions of the columns contained within the data, see the Variable Dictionary; and for an overview of the characteristics of the data, see the Data Summary. These files can be downloaded from the bottom of this page. For details on the Companies House data by Fusion Data Science, see the links below in the related sources.
Quality, Representation and Bias
The data should contain a complete listing of the UK’s companies, and therefore should be fully representative with no bias. Some data are self-supplied by the companies lists and quality can vary. The COVID-19 pandemic may have had an impact on the data, as there were a large number of dissolutions post-pandemic - these may have happened during the lockdowns but were not processed at the time. Some will also relate to rapidly changing economic circumstances following the pandemic.
