UK sector benchmarks
How these figures were made, and what they do not cover
A benchmark is only worth quoting if you can see what it is drawn from and what it leaves out. This page is both. If you want to cite a figure from the sector pages, this is the page that stands behind it.
Published figures are as at 2026-Q4, the fourth quarter of 2026, from 461 sector and size cells.
The source
Accounts filed at Companies House, by the companies themselves
Every figure comes from the Companies House Accounts Data Product, the bulk file of accounts filed with the registrar. A UK company is required to file, so this is a statutory record rather than a survey and nobody opted into it.
We read each filing's balance sheet figures, attach the company's own SIC code, and compute quartiles by sector and size band. No individual company is named or published anywhere on these pages.
The figures are rebuilt quarterly. The quarter each page is drawn from is printed on that page.
The 5 figures
- Cash at bank
- Creditors due within one year
- Current ratio
- Net assets
- Employees
The 5 size bands
- All sizes: every company in the sector, including those whose filing states no headcount
- 0 to 1 employees: a director on their own, or close to it
- 2 to 9 employees: the band most owner-managed companies sit in
- 10 to 49 employees: established small companies
- 50 or more employees: the largest band this dataset separates
A company is placed in a band by the headcount its own filing states. The current ratio is computed per company from current assets over creditors falling due within one year, and only where the filing states both and the creditors figure is at least one pound.
The suppression rule
Nothing is published from fewer than 50 companies
A quartile computed over a handful of companies is noise wearing precision. So a sector and size combination needs at least 50 companies stating a figure before that figure is published. The floor is arbitrary, which is why it is stated rather than hidden.
A suppressed figure is said to be suppressed on the page where it would have appeared. It is never dropped quietly, and it is never published with a warning attached: a reader who cannot see what was withheld has no reason to trust what was not.
Sample sizes differ from row to row on the same page. That is deliberate: each figure is counted only across the companies whose filing states it, so cash and net assets in one sector are drawn from different numbers of companies. Each row prints its own.
Limits
What these figures cannot tell you
No trading figures, at any sample size. A small company files abridged accounts: a balance sheet, and no trading account. The source therefore holds nothing about what these companies take in or what they keep, and no sector figure of that kind appears anywhere on these pages. Anyone quoting one from this source is quoting something it does not contain.
Not every filing. Companies House states that the bulk accounts product covers accounts filed electronically, which it puts at about 75% of the 2.2 million sets it expects each year. Companies filing on paper are absent, and there is no reason to assume they resemble the rest.
No figure for all UK companies. A middle value across incomparable sectors is a number about nothing. There is no roll-up here, and a page that gives you one without a sector table behind it is guessing.
A filing is a date, not a year. Companies file at different points in their own financial year, so a quarter's figures are a snapshot across staggered year ends rather than one moment in the economy.
Dormant companies are excluded, along with companies whose filing carries no SIC code. A dormant balance sheet is not a trading peer, and a company with no sector cannot be placed in one.
Before anything is published
A quarter that is not clean holds the pages on the previous one
Every quarter is checked before it is published. If the newest quarter fails, these pages keep showing the last one that passed and say so at the top of this page. If neither passes, no figures are shown at all.
- Every published figure has a lower quartile, a median and an upper quartile.
- They are in order: lower quartile at or below the median, median at or below the upper.
- Every published figure clears the 50-company floor.
- A sector is published only when all 5 of its figures clear that floor across all company sizes.
Coverage
20 of the 21 SIC sections are published
The published sectors are the SIC 2007 sections, the top level of the official classification a company states on its own filing. Those excluded are named here with the reason, because a gap a reader has to notice is worse than one we point at.
Excluded, and why
Activities of extraterritorial organisations and bodies
3 of the 5 figures sit below the 50-company floor across all sizes (cash at bank, creditors due within one year, current ratio), so this sector is not published.
Licence and reuse
Free to quote, with an attribution
The underlying information is public sector information from the Companies House register. The attribution below is the one the licence asks for, and it is the line we carry on every page that prints a figure from it.
Our own figures, the quartiles and the sample counts, are free to quote on the same terms. Each sector page gives the exact citation line for that sector.
Companies House told us, in answer to our own enquiry, that this attribution applies and that there is no separate licence application to make. It also said that it does not give legal advice or formal licensing interpretations, so that is a sound basis and not a ruling. Nothing here is endorsed, reviewed or approved by Companies House.
Source: Companies House. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.