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2025 figures released
New 2025 figures were released in the UK Business Counts datasets on 14 October 2025. These complement the data published by ONS in the UK Business: Activity, Size and Location release.
The figures for this release are produced from an extract taken from the Inter-Departmental Business Register (IDBR), recording the position of businesses on 14 March 2025, in line with the same timing of all previous releases.
About the data
The release consists of three datasets: two containing counts based on the number of enterprises in an area and the other a count based on the number of local units.
An enterprise can be thought of as the overall business, made up of all the individual sites or workplaces. It is defined as the smallest combination of legal units (generally based on VAT and/or PAYE records) that has a certain degree of autonomy within an enterprise group.
A local unit is an individual site (for example a factory or shop) associated with an enterprise. It can also be referred to as workplace.
The product gives counts of the number of enterprises or local units within a geographic area, down to middle layer super output areas, broken down by employment size band, detailed industry (5 digit SIC2007) and legal status.