Home › Regions › 12 September 2026
Where Britain files its accounts
A handful of postcodes account for an outsized share of every set of company accounts filed in the country.
Company accounts are not filed evenly across the country, and not because business is distributed that way. A registered office is an address for service, and a single accountant or formation agent can be the registered address for thousands of companies. These are the places that file most.
Key points
- London files the most of any town in the series, at 227,671 accounts.
- Its deficit rate is 20.9 per cent against 17.4 per cent nationally.
- Registered office tells you where the post goes, not where the work is.
The towns filing most
| Town | Accounts | In deficit |
|---|---|---|
| London | 227,671 | 20.9% |
| Manchester | 22,513 | 18.7% |
| Birmingham | 20,062 | 18.8% |
| Glasgow | 14,528 | 16.9% |
| Bristol | 13,729 | 16.7% |
| Leeds | 11,889 | 17.0% |
| Nottingham | 10,656 | 17.8% |
| Leicester | 10,200 | 19.4% |
| Liverpool | 9,811 | 17.2% |
| Sheffield | 8,250 | 17.5% |
| Edinburgh | 7,898 | 17.0% |
| Harrow | 7,700 | 22.7% |
Read it as post, not as economy
The list above is close to useless as a map of British business and genuinely useful as a map of where company formation agents and accountants are. A town appearing high on it usually means one address in it is doing a great deal of work.
That is why we publish the industry split as the headline and the geography with a warning attached. A company declares what it does regardless of where its post goes.
What this does and does not mean
A deficit here means the accounts reported liabilities larger than assets at the balance sheet date. It is not insolvency. Companies funded by a parent or by director loans routinely report negative net assets while paying everything they owe, which is why this reports groups rather than naming companies.
Companies House does not verify the information filed with it. Everything here is what companies reported about themselves.
What happens next
As the series lengthens we will be able to separate the towns where a lot of companies are registered from the towns where a lot of companies are struggling. They are not the same list.
How this was produced. Companies House publishes the accounts registered with it as open data each working day. Cap News downloads that file, reads the tagged figures out of each filing and joins them to the company register. Nothing here is hand picked. The method sets out what is counted and what is not.