UK business survival rates: how many new firms are still trading five years on

Of the UK businesses that opened in 2019, 38.4% were still trading five years later. Survival is not evenly spread: it swings by more than ten points between regions and further between trades. Here is what the ONS figures show.

Watch: Three in five are gone

Of every 100 UK businesses that opened in 2019, about 38 were still trading in 2024.

That figure gets used to prove two opposite things: that starting a business is reckless, and that Britain is full of quitters. It proves neither. It is simply the normal shape of business ownership, and it has looked much like this for years. What is genuinely interesting is how unevenly it is spread.

The headline number

The five-year survival rate for UK businesses that opened in 2019 is 38.4%.

So roughly three in five did not reach their fifth birthday. That covers every trade and every part of the UK, which is exactly why the headline on its own is not very useful.

Note what "did not survive" means here. It means the business stopped being registered for VAT or PAYE. Some of those firms failed. Others were sold, merged, wound up on purpose, or simply shrank below the point where they had to register. The ONS count cannot tell those apart, and neither should you.

Where the business is matters more than you would guess

Survival swings by nearly 13 points between the best and worst regions of the UK.

For businesses born in 2019:

• South West: 43.5% survived five years. The highest.
• West Midlands: 30.6% survived. The lowest.

That is a real gap. A business started in Bristol had meaningfully better odds than the same business started in Wolverhampton. Local demand, rent, the mix of trades in the area and how much of the local economy leans on a few big employers all feed into it.

If you sell into one region, use your own region's number and not the national one.

The trade matters even more

Some trades are far harder to stay in than others.

Transport and storage has the lowest five-year survival of the main trades. Put a region and a trade together and the numbers get sharper still: of transport and storage businesses born in Wales in 2019, only 14.8% were still going five years later. Roughly one in seven.

Compare that with the same trade's opening rate. Transport and storage had the highest opening rate of any main group in 2024, at 15.6%. Lots of firms arriving, very few staying. That combination is what a genuinely hard trade looks like in the data.

Why openings and survival must be read together

A high opening rate is often a sign that a trade is easy to enter, not that it is easy to succeed in.

Think about what it takes to start. A courier business needs a van and a phone. An insurance broker needs qualifications, capital and permissions. That is most of why transport and storage opens at 15.6% while finance and insurance opens at 6.6%, and it is also most of why one of them churns and the other does not.

The useful rule: low barriers to entry produce high openings and low survival. When you see a trade with a spectacular opening rate, check its survival before you get excited.

What this means if you sell to new businesses

New firms are a real market, and this is the discipline it requires.

Expect the list to decay. If you build a list of firms that opened this year, roughly three in five will be gone within five years. That is not a reason to skip them. It is a reason not to treat a list as an asset that keeps its value.

Match the payment terms to the trade. Selling into a trade with 15% five-year survival on 90-day terms is a decision, and it should be a conscious one.

Sell to the survivors too. A business that has traded for six years in a hard trade has proved something. Firms of that age are usually easier to reach, better funded and less likely to vanish mid-contract than a firm three months old.

Refresh rather than re-buy. The practical answer is a search that keeps running, so new firms arrive and dead ones stop appearing, rather than one big list bought once. The timing side of that is covered in first 90 days: selling to companies the week they incorporate.

Checking whether a specific company is still trading

Survival statistics describe a group. They cannot tell you about the firm in front of you.

For that, the public record is the better source. Companies House shows whether a company is active, dormant or dissolved, and when it last filed. A firm that has not filed anything for two years is telling you something. So is one whose accounts are overdue. The mechanics are in Companies House deadlines explained.

This is also why we re-check every company on our own list each month, and why a company that leaves the public record stops appearing in searches.

Where these figures come from

All survival figures here are from the ONS bulletin *Business demography, UK: 2024*, published on 20 November 2025, and describe businesses that opened in 2019. Opening and closing rates for the same year come from the same release, and are set out in how many UK businesses open and close each year.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

See the firms behind the percentage

A survival rate tells you the odds. It does not tell you who is still open.

Leadistry reads the live public record. A search only returns firms that are still on it, each with a working website and a verified business email. You can also filter by how long a firm has traded. That is the simplest way to aim at the survivors rather than the arrivals.

Start free with 25 leads and try it on your own trade.