The 14,330 UK companies that are actually scaling
Only 4.9% of UK businesses with staff grow fast enough to count as high growth. There were 14,330 of them in 2024. If you sell anything priced for a company with headcount, these are the accounts worth knowing about.
Watch: One in twenty
Most business statistics count firms arriving and leaving. This one counts firms getting bigger, and it is a much better guide to who has money to spend.
In 2024 there were 14,330 high-growth UK businesses. That is 4.9% of all UK businesses with 10 or more employees. Roughly one in twenty.
What "high growth" actually means
The ONS uses a specific, checkable definition: a business with 10 or more employees that grew employment by an average of 20% or more a year over three years.
Three things follow from that definition, and all three matter:
- It measures people, not revenue. A firm that doubles turnover without hiring does not appear.
- It has a floor. A business with fewer than 10 employees cannot qualify, however fast it grows.
- It is sustained. Three years, not one good one.
So it is a deliberately narrow measure. That narrowness is what makes it useful: it filters out noise and one-off spikes and leaves companies that have genuinely been building.
Firms that are growing are firms that are buying.
Tell us the kind of company you sell to. We find them on the public record, check the website and the email, and hand you the list. It takes about two minutes instead of an afternoon.
Where they are
Growth clusters, by trade and by place.
By trade, information and communication leads at 9.2%, nearly double the all-industry rate of 4.9%. By region, London leads at 6.6%.
Neither is surprising, and both are actionable. If you sell software, recruitment, professional services or office space, the concentration tells you where the buying is happening. If you sell into a trade well below 4.9%, you are selling into a market where firms mostly stay the size they are, and your pitch should reflect that.
Why these companies are worth finding
A company that has added a fifth more staff every year for three years has a particular set of problems, and they are the problems most B2B products solve.
It has outgrown whatever it was using when it was half the size. Its processes were built for a smaller company. It is hiring, which means recruitment, onboarding, equipment, space, payroll complexity and training. It has probably passed a threshold that brings new compliance obligations. And crucially, it has budget and a reason to spend it.
Compare that with a stable firm of the same size that has been running the same way for a decade. Same number of staff. A very different mood about spending.
What this measure will not tell you
Two limits worth being honest about.
It is backward-looking. The three-year window means you are seeing companies that grew, not companies that are about to. Some will have stopped by the time you reach them.
It ignores small firms entirely. The 10-employee floor excludes the large majority of UK businesses. About 4.3 million of the 5.7 million private sector businesses employ nobody but the owner. A five-person firm growing fast does not show up at all. The wider size picture is in how many small businesses are there in the UK.
Finding growth signals yourself
You cannot buy the ONS list of the 14,330, and you would not want to: it is a statistical aggregate, not a directory.
What you can do is watch the public record for the signals that growth produces. Companies file. Filings change. The things a growing company does tend to show up: new director appointments, moving to bigger premises, accounts that step up a size band, a website that starts advertising roles.
None of those is proof on its own. Together they are a much fresher signal than a three-year statistical window, because they appear as they happen. The mechanics are in UK company buying signals.
Where these figures come from
All high-growth figures are from the ONS bulletin *Business demography, UK: 2024*, published on 20 November 2025. The trade and regional splits use the same release. The wider size figures come from *Business population estimates 2025*.
For how these numbers sit alongside openings and closings, see the fastest growing UK industries.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Find the ones near you
Leadistry reads the live UK public record and watches it for change. Filter by trade, area and how long a firm has traded. Each one comes with a working website and a verified business email.
Counting is free. Start free with 25 leads and see how many companies in your patch are showing the signals of growing.
Common questions
What counts as a high-growth business in the UK?
The ONS definition is a business with 10 or more employees that grew employment by an average of 20% or more a year over three years.
How many high-growth companies are there in the UK?
There were 14,330 in 2024, which is 4.9% of all UK businesses with 10 or more employees.
Which industry has the most high-growth businesses?
Information and communication, where 9.2% of businesses with staff met the high-growth definition in 2024, against 4.9% across all industries.