Business data is the information you use to decide which companies to sell to, how to reach them and when. The UK has 2.79 million VAT/PAYE businesses (ONS, March 2026), and most of their core data is free. This guide shows which fields cost money, what brokers charge, and where verified lists from £50 per 1,000 fit in.
UK Business Data in Numbers (2026)
There were 2.79 million VAT- or PAYE-registered businesses in the UK in March 2026 (ONS), but 5.48 million companies on the Companies House register (FYE 2026) and 5.7 million private-sector businesses including unregistered sole traders (DBT, 2025). The figures count different things.
Every list you are ever sold is a slice of one of these totals. Keep them to hand and you can test any broker’s headline in thirty seconds.
| Measure | Figure | Source | What it means for a buyer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Companies on the Companies House register | 5,479,045 | Companies House, FYE 2026 (pub. 25 Jun 2026) | Registered, not necessarily trading. Dormant and shell companies are in here. |
| New incorporations in the year | 815,277 | Companies House, FYE 2026 | About 2,200 new companies a day (815,277 / 365). No static list contains them. |
| Dissolutions in the year | 787,120 | Companies House, FYE 2026 | Records that go dead every year. An old file is full of them. |
| VAT and/or PAYE businesses | 2.79 million | ONS, March 2026 (released 24 Sep 2026, +1.9%) | The best count of businesses that actually trade at scale. |
| Local units (sites) | 3.2 million | ONS, March 2026 | Branches and premises. Useful if you sell to a site, not a head office. |
| Private-sector businesses incl. unregistered sole traders | 5.7 million | DBT, start of 2025 | The widest count. Most of the extra are one-person firms with no register entry. |
Why three totals? Companies House counts every registered company, trading or not. ONS counts businesses registered for VAT or PAYE, which is the closest thing to an official “active business” figure. DBT adds the unregistered sole traders that appear on no register at all. A list claiming more UK decision makers than this is counting people, duplicates or dead records, so ask which.
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 | £275–£350 per 1,000 records at UK brokers (RD Marketing) |
| Financial | Whether they can pay | Filed accounts, credit scores, payment performance | Filed accounts free (Companies House); scores sold by credit agencies |
| 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 come back to that below.
What’s in a Business Data Record, and Where Each Field Comes From
A UK business data record mixes free and paid fields. Company name, number, registered address, SIC code, directors and filed accounts are free from Companies House. Hygiene and care-quality status come free from the FSA and CQC. Trading phone and website usually come from the company’s own site. Named decision-makers, job titles and business emails come from company websites and licensed third-party B2B data providers, and that is the part buyers pay for.
This is how we build our own lists, field by field. Few guides publish it.
| Field | Where it comes from | Free at source? | Our tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| Company name | Companies House | Yes | Essential |
| Company number | Companies House | Yes | n/a |
| Registered address | Companies House | Yes | n/a |
| SIC code (industry) | Companies House | Yes | n/a (used to filter) |
| Incorporation date | Companies House | Yes | n/a |
| Directors | Companies House | Yes | Complete (owner / director name) |
| Filed accounts | Companies House | Yes | n/a |
| Food-hygiene status | FSA | Yes | n/a |
| Care-quality status | CQC | Yes | n/a |
| Website and trading phone | The company’s own website | Yes, if you collect it | Essential (website) · Growth (direct phone) |
| Named decision-maker and job title | Company websites and licensed third-party B2B providers | No | Complete |
| Business email (verified) | Company websites and licensed third-party B2B providers | No | Growth (verified email) · Complete (owner email) |
| Direct mobile | Licensed third-party B2B providers | No | Complete (where available) |
About half the fields a broker charges for are free public records. The parts that cost money are named people and verified contact details. When you compare business data lists, compare those columns, because the rest is the same register everyone downloads. Full provenance categories are on our data compliance page, and the register itself is unpacked in our Companies House data guide.
Free UK Business Data Sources
The main free sources of UK business data are Companies House, the FSA food hygiene ratings and the CQC care directory, all published under the Open Government Licence, which permits commercial use. ONS publishes the official business counts. You can build a working company list from these without paying anyone.
| Source | Covers | Access | Update cadence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Companies House | Every UK company: directors, filings, accounts, incorporations, dissolutions | Free API, plus a free bulk snapshot | API real time; snapshot monthly |
| Food Standards Agency | Food hygiene ratings and inspection dates for food businesses | Free API, no registration, Open Government Licence | Open-data download updated daily |
| CQC care directory | Regulated care locations in England | Free download, Open Government Licence | Published regularly |
| data.gov.uk | Tens of thousands of government datasets | Free, mostly Open Government Licence | Varies by dataset |
| ONS | Official business counts by industry, size and region | Free downloads | Annual |
Two things make the UK registers unusually good. Coverage first: registration is a legal obligation, so Companies House holds every limited company, not a self-selected sample of firms that filled in a form. Then freshness: the Companies House API is real time and the FSA open data is refreshed daily. Compare that with a bought file, verified once on the day of sale and decaying from then on.
The catch is the work. Joining a register to websites, cleaning out dissolved companies and matching each record to a real person takes real time if you do it by hand.
What Paid Providers Actually Charge You For
Paid providers charge for aggregation, verified contacts and scale. UK list brokers typically charge £275 to £350 per 1,000 records (RD Marketing), and B2B contact data decays at 22.5% to 70.3% a year (Landbase), so any list is a snapshot.
Aggregation. Pulling the registers into one filterable file, matching companies to websites and removing duplicates and dissolved firms. Real work, but the underlying company layer costs the provider nothing.
Verified contacts. The scarce layer. Contact data usually comes from licensed B2B data providers plus verification work. That is what you are paying for. 70.8% of contacts change at least one data point within 12 months (Landbase), so verification is never finished.
Scale. Enterprise platforms sell annual seats with CRM integration and international coverage. That earns its fee for large teams. For 500 UK accountants or 200 restaurants in one county, it rarely does.
We compared the main options, from enterprise platforms and mid-market tools to UK list brokers, in our guide to B2B data providers. The short version: the right provider depends on whether you need who data or when data.
Buying Verified UK Business Data Lists
We publish three tiers. Pick the fields you need, filter by industry and location, and get a clean CSV within one business day.
| Tier | Price per 1,000 leads | Monthly subscription (20% off) | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Essential | £50 (5p per lead) | £40/1k | Business name, website / domain, verification status, Google rating, Google Business page. Ideal for prospecting and market sizing. |
| Growth | £80 (8p per lead) | £64/1k | Everything in Essential, plus company social media pages, direct phone number and verified email address. Ideal for outbound sales and email campaigns. |
| Complete | £120 (12p per lead) | £96/1k | Everything in Growth, plus owner / director name, owner email address, direct mobile number (where available) and LinkedIn URL (where found). Ideal for account-based marketing and decision-maker outreach. |
One business day turnaround on orders under 10,000 leads (see our lead list terms). No contract, and monthly subscribers get 20% off with a re-verified refresh each month. Lists are compiled from UK public records and licensed data providers, then verified against public sources. You get a file built to your brief rather than a login to a UK business database you will half use.
Selling to one profession? Start with our lists by profession, for example the accountants email list.
How Businesses Actually Use Business Data
Businesses use business data in four ways: sales prospecting, marketing, credit checking and timing. The first three are crowded. The fourth is not.
Sales and lead generation
Build a list of companies that match your customer profile, get contact details, start calling. 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 what our verified lead lists are built for.
Marketing
The same data, used one step earlier: sizing a market, segmenting a mailing list by industry, choosing which towns to target with ads. Marketing teams need breadth over depth. We cover this 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 and payment-performance records are sold by credit agencies such as Dun & Bradstreet and Experian. For most small firms, a free look at the filing history catches the worst risks: a company nine months late filing accounts, or whose only director resigned last month, is telling you something.
Timing: the use almost nobody exploits
Every register above changes daily, and each change is an event that creates a need. 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. Sector triggers such as our Lift Signal work the same way. It’s the least crowded use, because it takes daily monitoring rather than a one-off download.
Lists Tell You Who. Signals Tell You When.
A business data list is a snapshot of who exists, decaying from the day it is delivered. A signal is a dated event from a public register, such as a new incorporation, a new director or a failed hygiene inspection, that shows which business needs you this week. Companies House recorded 815,277 incorporations in the year to March 2026, about 2,200 a day.
A list bought last quarter has none of them. A signal flips the job around: instead of calling 500 restaurants hoping a few have a problem, you start from the dozen that failed an inspection in the last seven days. Fewer calls, each with a documented reason to pick up.
| Static list | Live signal | |
|---|---|---|
| Answers | Who exists | Who needs you now |
| Freshness | Verified once, at sale | Pulled from registers such as the FSA open data, updated daily |
| Volume | Hundreds to thousands of records | A handful of businesses per week |
| Competition | Same records sold to your rivals | Few firms watch the source |
| Opening line | “Do you ever need…?” | “I saw what happened last Tuesday.” |
The Compliance Bit
Using business data for marketing in the UK is legal and routine. Two sets of rules apply.
UK GDPR covers personal data, and a named person’s work details count. Most B2B marketing relies on legitimate interests, which needs a documented three-part test: a real purpose, a genuine need, and a balance against the person’s rights.
PECR governs the channel. Its email-consent rule does not apply to corporate subscribers such as limited companies and LLPs. Sole traders and some partnerships count as individual subscribers, so they need consent. Every message needs a working opt-out, and any UK data seller should give you their ICO registration number without fuss.
The detail, including list-buying due diligence, is in our guide to compliant B2B data.
Business Data FAQs
What is business data?
Information about companies used for commercial decisions: who they are (firmographics), how to reach them, whether they can pay, and what has just changed. In the UK the first layer is free from Companies House, the FSA and the CQC under the Open Government Licence. What you pay for is named contacts, verified email and phone details, and keeping them current.
Where can I get free UK business data?
Companies House publishes the full register via a free API and monthly bulk download. The FSA publishes hygiene ratings as open data, and the CQC publishes a directory of regulated care services in England. All are under the Open Government Licence, which permits commercial use. ONS publishes official business counts.
What do paid providers actually sell?
Aggregation, verified contact details and scale. The raw company layer is public. The scarce part is named decision-makers with working emails and phone numbers, sourced from company websites and licensed B2B providers, then verified. That verification work, repeated as contacts change jobs, is what the fee covers.
Is it legal to use business data for marketing in the UK?
Yes, under UK GDPR and PECR. UK GDPR covers named individuals at work, usually on legitimate interests with a documented test. PECR’s email-consent rule does not apply to corporate subscribers (limited companies, LLPs); sole traders and some partnerships count as individuals. Every message needs an opt-out.
How many businesses are there in the UK?
It depends what you count. According to ONS there were 2.79 million VAT/PAYE-registered businesses in March 2026. According to Companies House there were 5.48 million companies on the register (FYE 2026). According to DBT there were 5.7 million private-sector businesses including unregistered sole traders (2025). The totals differ because each one counts a different kind of business.
How much does UK business data cost?
According to RD Marketing, UK list brokers typically charge £275 to £350 per 1,000 records. B2B Data Scout publishes £50, £80 and £120 per 1,000 records depending on enrichment, with 20% off monthly subscriptions. The company layer itself is free at source, so the price reflects contact details and verification.
Start With Verified UK Business Data
The firmographic layer is free and everyone can get it. The contact layer is where lists earn their price. The signal layer, who needs you this week according to a government register, is free at source and still mostly unused.
Our verified UK business data lists start from £50 per 1,000, delivered in one business day with no contract. Want the when as well as the who? See Lift Signal, or tell us who you want to reach and we’ll reply with a quote.