A pest control company in Kent paid £300 for a spreadsheet of restaurants last year. Business name, address, phone number, company registration. Every field on that spreadsheet came from records the UK government publishes for free. The broker’s work was downloading them, formatting them, and adding a markup.
That’s the open secret of the business data industry. The UK publishes more free, official, machine-readable business data than almost any country on earth — and most of the people paying for data have no idea it exists.
This guide covers the whole landscape: what business data actually means, where the free official sources are, what paid providers genuinely add, how businesses use the data for sales, marketing and credit decisions — and the one type of business data that matters more than all the others.
What Business Data Actually Means
Search “business data” and you’ll find articles about structured versus unstructured data, master data management, and data warehouses. That’s IT department language. It won’t help you win a single customer.
For a working business, business data means information about other companies that helps you make commercial decisions. It breaks into four types:
| Type | What it tells you | Examples | Cost at source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Firmographic | Who a company is | Name, registered address, SIC code, age, size, trading status | Free (Companies House) |
| Contact | How to reach decision-makers | Names, direct phone numbers, verified email addresses | Paid — the scarce layer |
| Financial | Whether they can pay | Filed accounts, credit scores, payment performance | Accounts free; scores paid |
| Event / signal | What just happened to them | New incorporation, director appointment, failed inspection, new registration | Free — and mostly ignored |
Most of the money in the data industry changes hands over the first two rows. Most of the commercial value sits in the last one. We’ll come back to that.
The UK’s Free Business Data Goldmine
The UK government publishes official registers covering millions of businesses, updated constantly, licensed for commercial use. These aren’t scraped datasets of questionable provenance. They’re the primary records — the same business data sources the paid providers build their products on.
Companies House is the big one. Every limited company in the UK — 5.4 million on the register, with roughly 800,000 new incorporations and 726,000 dissolutions a year — is on public record. Directors, registered addresses, filing history, accounts, ownership. The Companies House API serves all of it free, in real time, with no commercial restrictions, and there’s a free bulk snapshot of the entire register updated monthly. We’ve written a full breakdown of what Companies House data contains and how to use it for lead generation.
The Food Standards Agency publishes the food hygiene rating of every inspected food business in the country — around 599,000 establishments across 363 local authorities, under the Open Government Licence. The API needs no registration. If you sell to restaurants, cafes, hotels or care kitchens, this dataset tells you which ones just failed an inspection.
The Care Quality Commission publishes a directory of every regulated care location in England — every care home, hospital, dentist and home care agency — including new registrations. A new registration means a facility that needs staff, equipment and suppliers, all at once, from scratch.
data.gov.uk and the ONS round it out: tens of thousands of government datasets, plus official statistics on business births, deaths, industries and regions. Planning applications, premises licences, procurement notices, environmental permits — nearly all of it free, nearly all of it under the Open Government Licence, which explicitly allows commercial use.
Two things make the UK registers unusual. First, coverage: registration is a legal obligation, so the data covers every limited company, not a self-selected sample. Second, freshness: Companies House updates in real time and the FSA publishes new inspection results daily. Compare that with a purchased list, verified once at the point of sale and decaying from that day forward.
Here’s the question worth sitting with: if the raw data is free, what exactly are you paying a provider for?
What Paid Providers Actually Charge You For
Three things — and only one of them is genuinely hard to get anywhere else.
Aggregation and convenience. Pulling Companies House records into a filterable platform, matching them to websites, deduplicating. Real work, but work you’re paying a heavy markup on. UK list brokers charge around £275–£350 per 1,000 records for data whose firmographic layer cost them nothing.
Verified contact details. This is the genuinely scarce layer. Companies House will tell you a director’s name, but not their mobile number or email address. Finding, verifying and maintaining that contact data is what enterprise platforms like ZoomInfo (roughly $15,000 a year) and Cognism (roughly $25,000 a year) actually sell. It’s also why the data decays so expensively: B2B contact data decays at 22.5–70.3% per year, and 70.8% of contacts change at least one data point within 12 months. You’re not buying a database. You’re renting a snapshot.
Scale. If you need 50,000 records across Europe with CRM integration, a platform earns its fee. If you need 200 restaurants in Kent, it doesn’t.
We compared the main options — enterprise platforms, mid-market tools and UK list brokers — in our guide to B2B data providers. The short version: the right provider depends entirely on whether you need who data or when data. Which brings us to how businesses actually use this stuff.
How Businesses Actually Use Business Data
Sales and lead generation
The most common use: build a list of companies that match your customer profile, get contact details, start calling. Firmographic data does the targeting, contact data does the reaching. A commercial cleaning firm might pull every company under SIC code 56101 (licensed restaurants) within 25 miles, filter to those trading for more than two years, then layer on phone numbers and decision-maker names.
The first half of that job is free. The second half — accurate contact details — is where lists earn their keep or waste your week. It’s what our verified lead lists are built for: UK businesses checked against multiple public sources, priced per lead instead of per platform seat.
Marketing
The same data, used one step earlier: sizing a market before entering it, segmenting a mailing list by industry, choosing which towns to target with ads. Marketing teams tend to need breadth over depth — more companies, fewer fields. We cover this use case separately in our guide to marketing data.
Credit checking
Before you supply goods on 30-day terms, you want to know the customer can pay. Filed accounts are free at Companies House. Credit scores, payment-performance records and CCJ monitoring are the proprietary layer sold by credit agencies like Dun & Bradstreet and Experian — worth paying for when a single bad debt could hurt.
For most small firms, though, a free look at the filing history catches the worst risks before a single pound changes hands. A company that’s nine months late filing accounts is telling you something. So is one that switched registered address three times in a year, or whose only director resigned last month.
Timing — the use almost nobody exploits
Every register above changes daily. Each change is an event in a business’s life — and events create needs. A restaurant fails a hygiene inspection: it needs pest control and deep cleaning now. A care home registers with the CQC: it needs staff and equipment now. A company appoints a new director: someone new is reviewing suppliers, with a mandate to change things.
This is business data used as a trigger rather than a directory. It’s the least crowded use of the four, because it takes daily monitoring infrastructure rather than a one-off download — and because the whole industry is organised around selling lists, not moments.
Lists Tell You Who. Signals Tell You When.
Think about what a list actually is: a snapshot of who existed, taken at some point in the past, decaying from the moment it’s compiled. Even a perfect list has the fundamental flaw that it says nothing about which of those businesses needs you this week. You’re calling 500 restaurants hoping a few happen to have a problem you solve.
A signal inverts that. Instead of starting from “every restaurant in Kent”, you start from “every restaurant in Kent that failed its hygiene inspection in the last seven days”. The list shrinks from 500 to a dozen — but every one of them has a documented, time-stamped reason to take your call. Fewer conversations, radically better ones.
| Static list | Live signal | |
|---|---|---|
| Answers | Who exists | Who needs you now |
| Freshness | Verified once, at sale | Pulled from registers updated daily |
| Volume | Hundreds to thousands of records | A handful of businesses per week |
| Competition | Same records sold to your rivals | Almost nobody monitors the source |
| Opening line | “Do you ever need…?” | “I saw what happened last Tuesday” |
The strange part is that the signal layer is the free layer. The contact database industry charges thousands for the who. The when sits in public registers, updated daily, ignored — because monitoring it takes infrastructure most SMEs don’t have and most vendors don’t sell. That gap is the single biggest arbitrage in UK business data right now.
The Compliance Bit (Shorter Than You Think)
Using business data for marketing in the UK is legal and routine, but two sets of rules apply, and it pays to know which is which.
UK GDPR covers personal data — and a named individual’s work details count, even in a business context. Most B2B marketing runs on the legitimate interests lawful basis, which requires a documented three-part test: a real purpose, a genuine need, and a balance against the individual’s rights.
PECR governs the channel. The useful rule: the email consent requirement does not apply to corporate subscribers — limited companies and LLPs. You can email a limited company without prior consent, provided you identify yourself and offer an opt-out. Sole traders and partnerships count as individuals, so they need consent. And any legitimate UK data seller should hand over their ICO registration number without hesitation.
That’s the outline. The detail — lawful bases, list-buying due diligence, what “GDPR-compliant data” claims actually mean — is in our guide to compliant B2B data.
Business Data FAQs
What is business data?
Information about companies used to make commercial decisions. In practice: firmographic data (who a company is), contact data (how to reach its decision-makers), financial data (whether it can pay), and event or signal data (what just happened to it that creates a need).
Is UK business data free?
A large share of it is. Companies House publishes the entire register free, with no commercial restrictions. The FSA publishes every food hygiene rating free with no registration. The CQC publishes every regulated care location in England. What’s not free is verified contact data — direct dials and validated emails.
What do paid providers actually sell?
Mostly enrichment and convenience on top of public records, plus the genuinely scarce layer: verified contact details, which decay at 22.5–70.3% a year and take real work to maintain. UK brokers charge around £275–£350 per 1,000 records; enterprise platforms run £12,000–£25,000 a year.
Is it legal to use business data for marketing?
Yes, with rules. UK GDPR applies to named individuals even at work; PECR’s email consent rule exempts limited companies and LLPs; sole traders need consent; every message needs an opt-out.
Start With the Data Nobody Else Is Using
The business data landscape sorts into a simple hierarchy. The firmographic layer is free and everyone can get it. The contact layer is paid and everyone in your sector is buying roughly the same records. The signal layer — who needs you, this week, according to a government register — is free at source and almost nobody is using it.
That’s where we sit. We monitor UK public registers daily — hygiene inspections, care registrations, director appointments, new incorporations — and deliver the businesses with a fresh, documented reason to need our clients’ services. As a CSV, by email. No platform, no annual contract.
If you sell to UK businesses, tell us what you sell. We’ll send you a free sample of 10–20 leads from your patch, each with the trigger event that makes them worth calling this week — so you can judge the data on results, not promises.