VAT or PAYE registered businesses (UK Business Counts)
Enterprises registered for VAT and/or PAYE on the Inter-Departmental Business Register, as at March of the year. An enterprise is the smallest combination of legal units with autonomy over its decisions, counted once in the area of its registered office or main site. ONS UK Business Counts (Nomis dataset NM_142_1), all employment sizes and legal statuses. All industries.
Counts are rounded to the nearest 5 by ONS, so small areas and industries carry rounding error and components do not add up exactly. Businesses below the VAT threshold with no employees are not included, so this is not the total business population (the business population estimates are larger), and it is not comparable with Eurostat enterprise counts for EU countries. The year is the March snapshot: 2026 means March 2026.
Key facts
- Published for 374 places, with figures from 2010 to 2026.
Places with data
Countries
Regions and states
- South East
- London
- North West
- East of England
- West Midlands
- South West
- Yorkshire and The Humber
- Scotland
- East Midlands
- Wales
- North East
- Northern Ireland
Provinces and counties
- Birmingham
- Leeds
- Glasgow City
- North Yorkshire
- Somerset
- Manchester
- Cornwall
- Buckinghamshire
- Sheffield
- Bradford
- Guildford
- Epsom and Ewell
- Shropshire
- Cheshire West and Chester
- Mid Suffolk
- Ipswich
Use this data in your AI agent
Invokely serves this figure to AI assistants through MCP and to code through a REST API, with the source and citation attached. Ask your assistant:
Which places have the highest VAT or PAYE registered businesses (UK Business Counts)? Use official data and cite it.
rank_places {"indicator":"registered_enterprises_total","level":"country"}
GET https://invokely.ai/api/v1/rank?indicator=registered_enterprises_total&level=country