The Fastest-Growing Companies in the UK | 2025
We recently launched a new series highlighting the fastest-growing companies across every nation in the UK. With 4.86m active companies generating over £36m in average turnover and employing more than 42 million people, the UK is one of the world’s most dynamic business hubs.
Each country brings unique strengths — England leading with London’s 1.34m companies, Scotland’s Edinburgh driving nearly 20% of its business base, Cardiff home to almost a third of Wales’s companies, and Belfast anchoring Northern Ireland’s entrepreneurial scene.
From construction and hospitality to trade services and software, the UK’s high-growth landscape reflects both traditional industries and emerging innovation sectors.
Let’s take a closer look.
How we created our lists
To profile the fastest-growing companies in England, Scotland and Wales, we used data from the Beauhurst platform, which was used in conjunction with research from the Sunday Times to create the Sunday Times Hundred. This ranking, published in the Sunday Times on 29th June, ranks the UK’s fastest growing companies by sales growth over a three year period.
However, we used a slightly different method when exploring Northern Ireland’s fastest-growing companies, as there were no Northern Irish companies featured on the 2025 Sunday Times Hundred.
To identify the fastest-growing companies in Northern Ireland, we’ve calculated turnover growth between each company’s two most recent financial statements.
The fastest-growing companies in Scotland
Discover the key insights and trends behind the high-growth economy in Scotland.
Mapping the UK’s business landscape
The UK is home to 4.86m active companies, generating an average £36.2m in turnover and employing more than 42 million people in total.
Unsurprisingly, England dominates the landscape with 4.78m companies, representing 98% of the UK total. London alone accounts for nearly a third of the UK’s businesses (1.34m), followed by the South East (640k) and the North West (479k).
Scotland ranks second, with 279k companies — 5.7% of the UK total. Of these, 55.7k (20%) are headquartered in Edinburgh.
Wales is home to 155k companies (3.2% of the UK total), with Cardiff hosting 46.1k, almost a third of the nation’s total.
Northern Ireland has the smallest share, with 80.2k companies (just 1.6% of the UK total). Of these, 22.1k (28%) are based in Belfast, a proportion just shy of the averages seen across the other nations.
The fastest-growing companies in Wales
Discover the landscape of high-growth companies in Wales. See which companies made the top ten list.
The UK’s top industries
From our research for this series, it was evident that there is a lot of crossover in the top industries in each of the UK’s nations.
As detailed in this table, property development and construction; restaurants, pubs, cafes and takeaways; and tradespeople and trade services, all made it into the top industries for each nation. And it’s no surprise that there’s quite a lot of overlap in the UK’s top industries.
However, as we saw with England’s top industries, application software makes up a significant proportion of UK companies (6.5%) making it the second biggest industry in the UK.
The fastest-growing companies in Northern Ireland
Explore Northern Ireland’s rich high-growth ecosystem in the third instalment of our series.
Foundations and cessations
Since 2023, there’s been a small decline in company foundations in the UK — dropping from 879k in 2023 to 846k in 2024. In 2025, there’s been 575k foundations so far, meaning we’re on the way to having a similar number of foundations this year overall.
We’ve also seen a slight incline in the number of cessations since 2023, going from 666k to 688k in 2024. So far in 2025, there’s been 525k cessations which means we could finish with record level cessations by the end of the year.
Find this data for yourself
All the data we used to create these lists is available on our platform.
Find high-growth companies all across the UK, in any subset or niche. Whether you’re interested in the UK’s tech startups or Germany’s innovative manufacturing firms, our platform has everything.
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