How to Find Recently Incorporated UK Companies by SIC Code

Companies House registers thousands of new UK businesses every week. Here is the practical playbook for finding them by industry, region and incorporation date.

Roughly 12,000 new UK limited companies are incorporated every single week. Most of them have no accountant yet, no website, no insurance, no payment processor and no bookkeeping software. If your product helps brand-new businesses, this is the single highest-intent audience you can reach in the UK, and Companies House publishes the entire list, for free, every working day.

The catch is that the official Companies House search is built for compliance lookups, not lead generation. To turn it into a usable B2B prospecting feed you need three things: the right SIC code mapping, a sensible incorporation-date window, and a way to enrich the raw register entries with verified websites and emails.

This guide walks through all three.

What is a SIC code?

SIC stands for Standard Industrial Classification. Every UK limited company picks one to five SIC codes when it incorporates, telling Companies House what kind of business it is. The current list is the SIC 2007 revision, with around 730 five-digit codes grouped into 21 high-level sections.

The trick to using SIC codes for prospecting is that they are *self-declared*. A new founder picking codes during incorporation will often choose whatever sounds closest, not what is technically correct. So when you build a target list, you usually want a cluster of related codes, not a single one.

For example, a "construction trades" prospect list usually combines:

• 41201, Construction of commercial buildings
• 41202, Construction of domestic buildings
• 43210, Electrical installation
• 43220, Plumbing, heat and air-conditioning installation
• 43330, Floor and wall covering
• 43390, Other building completion and finishing

Cast your net by group, then narrow with other filters.

Step 1, Pick your SIC cluster

Start by writing down, in plain English, who you want to sell to. Then map that to codes. The Office for National Statistics publishes the full SIC 2007 list, search it for words a founder would actually type when incorporating ("plumbing", "marketing", "insurance brokerage", "online retail").

Some of the highest-volume, highest-intent SIC clusters for 2026 prospecting:

• Professional services, 70229 (management consultancy, n.e.c.), 69202 (bookkeeping), 69201 (accounting and auditing)
• Marketing & creative, 73110 (advertising agencies), 74100 (specialised design), 74201 (portrait photography)
• Construction & trades, 41201, 41202, 43210, 43220 (see above)
• IT & web, 62012 (business and domestic software development), 62020 (computer consultancy), 63110 (data processing and hosting)
• E-commerce & retail, 47910 (retail sale via mail order or internet), 47990 (other retail not in stores)
• Hospitality, 56101 (licensed restaurants), 56210 (event catering), 55209 (other holiday accommodation)

Step 2, Pick your incorporation window

The most valuable signal isn't the SIC code itself, it's *how recently* the company was incorporated. Three windows that consistently convert:

• 0–3 months, first-mover audience for first accountants, business banking, payment processors and brand new business insurance.
• 3–12 months, past the survival cliff but still pre-website for many. Best for web designers, branding agencies and bookkeepers.
• 1–3 years, past the start-up phase and starting to scale. Best for working capital, cyber insurance, HR software and second-stage cover renewals.

Inside Leadistry, every search builder template is pre-configured to one of these windows. Outside Leadistry, you'll need to filter the daily Companies House data dumps by the date_of_creation field.

Step 3, Filter by region (or don't)

If you serve a local market, a Manchester bookkeeper, a Bristol web agency, narrow by region using the registered office postcode. If you serve nationally, skip this step. The biggest mistake we see new prospectors make is over-narrowing on day one and ending up with a list of 12 companies.

Step 4, Enrich the list

A raw Companies House export gives you the company name, registered address, SIC codes, incorporation date and director names. To actually outbound to them, you need at minimum:

• A verified website (so you know they exist and what they do)
• A named work email (not info@, see our poor-website prospecting guide)
• The director's name, so you know who you are writing to

This is the part Companies House won't do for you. You can hand-enrich a small list using Google + LinkedIn, or use a tool like Leadistry that runs an automated enrichment pipeline against every company on your filtered list and returns the clean, verified contacts only.

What to do with the list

Don't blast it. The single highest-converting first-touch for newly incorporated companies in our customer data is a personalised email referencing the incorporation date ("I noticed you incorporated [Company Name] last month, congratulations…"). Reply rates above 8% are normal when the timing is right. (Watch replies, not opens: opens are only an approximation.)

If you're an accountant, lead with a fixed-fee onboarding offer, then pair the new-incorporation list with the Companies House filing deadline calendar to catch companies in immediate-buying mode. If you're a web designer, lead with a free homepage mockup. If you're an insurance broker, lead with the specific cover their SIC code typically requires.

Bottom line

UK Companies House gives you the freshest, most actionable B2B prospect feed in the country, completely free. The work is in the SIC mapping, the date filtering and the enrichment, three steps you can do by hand, or hand to your AI lead-gen employee, which drafts the search, the watch and the emails as a Pipeline from a two-minute chat.