How Many Accountancy Firms Are There in the UK?

General information for practice owners, current to September 2026. The figures here are our own, counted from the Companies House company-data snapshot of 1 August 2026 — 5,695,466 companies scanned, 49,124 kept. The method and its limits are set out at the foot of this page, and they matter: this is the incorporated profession, not every accountant in the country.

Ask how many accountancy firms there are in the UK and you get estimates, professional-body membership counts, or a number somebody rounded a decade ago. None of them answer the question a practice owner is actually asking, which is usually some version of how many firms are there like mine, and how many of them are at the same stage I am?

So we counted. Companies House publishes a full snapshot of every company on the register, free, every month. Taking the snapshot dated 1 August 2026 and keeping the active companies whose primary SIC code is accounting, bookkeeping or tax — 69201, 69202 and 69203 — gives 49,124 firms. That is the number, and everything below comes out of the same file.

The profession is growing, and it is growing at the accounting end

New accountancy practices are being incorporated at a materially higher rate than a decade ago. In 2016, 1,407 companies were formed with accounting as their primary activity. In 2024 it was 2,254 — a rise of 60%. Bookkeeping, over the same period, barely moved.

Two things are worth pulling out of that. The first is that 2024 was the busiest year on the register for new accountancy practices in at least a decade, and 2025 came in a little below it rather than continuing the climb. The second is the split: accounting practice formations are up around 47% since 2015, bookkeeping formations up about 25% from a much smaller base. The competition arriving in the market is arriving as practices, not as bookkeepers.

Two thirds of the profession files as a micro-entity

Of the 49,124 firms, 31,553 file micro-entity accounts — 64%. A further 11,724 file total-exemption full accounts. Ninety-nine firms in the entire country file full accounts.

Micro-entity thresholds are low by design, so this is a reasonable proxy for a very small business: the overwhelming majority of UK accountancy firms are one or two people. That is not a surprise to anyone who has worked in the profession, but the scale of it is worth sitting with. When trade press writes about consolidation and private equity, it is describing a few hundred firms at the top of a market of nearly fifty thousand, almost all of which are tiny.

The share barely shifts with age, either. Among firms under five years old, 57% file as micro-entities. Among firms trading twenty years or more, it is 60%. Most practices do not start small and grow — they start small and stay small, which is a choice as often as it is a constraint.

8,200 firms are old enough for succession to be a live question

Age is the most useful cut in the whole dataset, because it is the only succession signal Companies House gives you for free.

8,200 firms have been incorporated for twenty years or more. If a practice was incorporated in 2006 by someone who was already established, its owner is now plausibly in their fifties or sixties. That is the pool every consolidator, broker and acquirer in the market is fishing in, and it is smaller than the noise around practice acquisition suggests — about one firm in six.

It is also very unevenly spread. Of those 8,200, 7,557 are in England, 271 in Scotland, 271 in Wales and 98 in Northern Ireland. If you are a Scottish or Welsh practice owner thinking about an exit, there are fewer firms in your position competing for the same buyers — and fewer local comparables when it comes to price.

Where they all are, and the towns that surprise you

London holds 8,415 accountancy firms — one in six of every firm on the register. Manchester is next with 917 and Birmingham with 846, which is to say the second city of UK accountancy is roughly a ninth the size of the first.

Harrow and Ilford both have more accountancy firms registered than Leeds, Nottingham or Sheffield. Neither is a financial centre. Both are outer-London postal towns with large numbers of very small owner-managed companies, and that is the point: accountancy firms cluster where owner-managed businesses cluster, not where the tall buildings are. If you are deciding where to buy, or where to advertise, the register is a better guide than instinct.

What to take from this if you own a practice

You have more competition than you did, and it is newer. Nearly 12,000 of the firms on the register were incorporated in the last five years. A good proportion will not survive, but they are all pitching in the meantime, usually on price.

The succession market is thinner than the marketing suggests. 8,200 firms nationally are at the twenty-year mark. If you are one of them, there are fewer sellers than the volume of approaches you receive implies — which is a stronger position than most owners assume they are in.

Scale is unusual, so it is a differentiator. Ninety-nine firms in the country file full accounts. If you are trying to work out what makes a practice saleable, being visibly bigger than a micro-entity is a rarer signal than it sounds.

Geography is not what you think. Outside London, the market is far flatter than the league table of cities would suggest, and the outer-London towns punch well above their profile.

How we counted, and what this does not tell you

The source is the Companies House free company-data snapshot dated 1 August 2026, a full extract of the register. We scanned all 5,695,466 companies in it and kept those whose primary SIC code is 69201 (accounting and auditing), 69202 (bookkeeping) or 69203 (tax consultancy). We then removed companies that were dormant, not in active status, incorporated less than a year ago, or named as a vehicle rather than a practice. That leaves 49,124.

Four honest limits:

This is the incorporated profession only. Sole practitioners and partnerships that never incorporated do not appear on the register at all, and there are a lot of them. The real number of people practising is higher than 49,124.

SIC codes are self-reported and never audited. A firm that picked the wrong code at formation keeps it for years. Expect both false positives and firms that should be here and are not.

Incorporation date is not the date the practice started. Plenty of long-established partnerships incorporated in the 2000s and show as twenty years old when they have been trading for forty. Read the age table as a floor, not a biography.

Accounts type is a proxy for size, not a measurement of it. A firm can file micro-entity accounts and still be a decent business; it tells you about the balance sheet, not the fee income.

We will re-run this against a later snapshot and publish the movement. If you want a cut of the data for your own town or your own size band, ask — it costs us nothing to run.