The UK recruitment agency market, and why it swings
Recruitment agencies sit in the trade group that opened 14.4% and closed 13.5% of its businesses in a year. Agencies are a cyclical, low-barrier, high-churn market, and that shapes both when they buy and how fast your list ages.
Recruitment is one of the most cyclical businesses in the country, and one of the easiest to start. Those two facts compound.
Where agencies sit in the data
Agencies fall inside business administration and support services, which opened 14.4% and closed 13.5% of its businesses in 2024.
There is no separate headline figure for recruitment in the ONS releases. If you want a count of agencies, you build it from the trade codes on the public record rather than reading it off a bulletin. The codes:
- 78109 other activities of employment placement agencies, the main permanent-recruitment code
- 78200 temporary employment agency activities, where the contract and temp desks sit
- 78300 other human resources provision
The split between 78109 and 78200 matters more than it looks. A perm agency and a temp agency have different cash flows, different software, different problems and different buying triggers. A list that merges them is two lists in a trench coat.
Why it swings so hard
Recruitment demand is a leveraged bet on everybody else's hiring.
When companies are growing, they hire, and agencies do well. When companies pause, hiring is one of the first things to stop, and agency revenue falls faster than the wider economy does. The same cycle runs in reverse on the way up.
Now add how easy it is to start. A recruiter can go it alone with a laptop and their contacts. That gives you what the numbers show: a lot of new firms, a lot of closures, and a few that last.
Agencies churn. Your list should keep up.
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.
When agencies buy
The cyclicality creates unusually clear buying moments.
Just after founding. A recruiter who has left a larger agency to go alone needs a CRM, a website, job board access, contracts, insurance and accounting, more or less at once. This is the single best moment to reach them, and incorporation dates are public.
When they start hiring their own staff. Going from one recruiter to three changes what the business needs. Director appointments and a growing team are visible signals.
When the market turns. In a downturn agencies buy things that cut cost. In an upturn they buy things that add capacity. The same product often needs a different pitch depending on which half of the cycle you are in.
Two things that catch suppliers out
Your list ages fast. In a trade churning at 13 to 14% a year, a file of agencies goes stale quickly, and the closures cluster after a downturn. If you email a list built eighteen months ago, expect a meaningful bounce rate purely from firms that no longer exist. The cost of that is set out in where UK companies are closing fastest.
Agencies are also your competitors for attention. Recruiters do outreach for a living. They send more cold email than almost anyone, and they spot a template at a glance. A generic sequence performs worse here than in any other sector, and specificity is not optional.
Building a usable list
Three filters:
- The right code. 78109 or 78200, not both, unless you genuinely sell to both.
- Company age. Recently formed agencies are a different market from established ones, and far easier to sell to.
- A working website with a real email. An agency with no functioning web presence is usually either brand new or already gone.
Sector specialism is the one thing the trade codes cannot give you: whether an agency recruits for construction or for finance is on their website, not in their filing.
Where these figures come from
Birth and death rates are from ONS *Business demography, UK: 2024*, published 20 November 2025, for the business administration and support services group. SIC codes are from the ONS SIC 2007 classification.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
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Common questions
What SIC code do recruitment agencies use?
78109 for other activities of employment placement agencies, 78200 for temporary employment agency activities, and 78300 for other human resources provision. Most permanent-placement agencies use 78109.
How many recruitment agencies are there in the UK?
There is no separate ONS headline count for agencies. They sit inside business administration and support services, so the count has to be built from the SIC codes on the public record rather than read off a statistical release.
Why is recruitment such a high-churn industry?
Two reasons together. The barrier to entry is very low, a laptop and a phone will do, and demand is strongly cyclical, so agencies are founded quickly in good years and close quickly in bad ones.