Sources & methodology.
Nothing here asks for your trust. Every figure is computed from public records, and this page shows the working — the source, whether it's pulled live, and how it's calculated. If a number can't be traced to a Companies House filing, an ONS release, or a computation described below, we don't publish it.
CompaniesIQ covers the entire UK register — every company, officer, person with significant control (PSC), filing and charge — queried live from Companies House. We don't hold a private copy that drifts out of date; the record you see is the record as it stands.
Live vs. reference.
Live API
Fetched in real time from a public API and cached briefly. Companies House powers all company and register data; Nomis/ONS powers regional labour-market indicators. These reflect the latest published period.
Reference baseline
Drawn from official ONS annual releases with no queryable API (business-survival rates; sector population totals). Used as indicative baselines and always labelled as such — we don't recompute them from a different data universe and present the result as official.
Derived figures
A few report figures (e.g. local market density) are transparently derived by combining live register data with a reference baseline. These are marked “derived” wherever they appear.
How the figures are computed.
The “as of” date
Companies House publishes new incorporations a few days in arrears, so a window ending today would read partly empty. We find the most recent date that actually has published incorporations and anchor every live window to it — that's the “as of” date on the dashboard. Recomputed hourly.
Active companies
A live count of companies whose register status is active, straight from the Companies House search API — not a stored figure.
New companies (window)
The count of companies incorporated between the window's start and the “as of” anchor — e.g. the last 30 days. We count the same-length preceding window too, so the period-over-period change is a real comparison, not an estimate.
Dissolved & net new
Dissolutions are counted the same way over the window; net new is simply new incorporations minus dissolutions across that period.
Fastest-growing sector & region
Recent incorporations are classified by their SIC codes into sectors and by registered office into UK regions, then ranked by formation activity. These are “fastest-forming” from live register data — not a market-share, revenue or growth-rate claim about the wider economy.
Formation trend
Real Companies House counts, one per time bucket — daily, weekly or monthly depending on the range you pick. Cached for an hour, so warm page loads cost zero API calls and everyone sees the same numbers.
Point-in-time
Live figures are snapshots cached briefly. The register changes continuously, so an exact count can move between page loads. Where a figure is dated, that date is the computation date.
Enrichment (fenced)
Anything beyond the register — e.g. a company's digital presence — is a separate, clearly-labelled enrichment layer. Each value is a measured fact with its source, or marked “Not Assessed”. We never guess a value and present it as fact.
Signals, not verdicts.
What this is
Everything we surface — new formations, sector and regional trends, growth signals — is an indicator drawn from public records to help you decide where to look, not a finding about any company or person, a credit decision, or professional advice.
Licence
All underlying data is © Crown copyright, reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Attribution shows on every report and in the footer.
Corrections
Think a figure is wrong, or a record about your company is inaccurate? Tell us and we'll review it. Register-sourced errors can also be corrected at the source, directly with Companies House.