New Office for National Statistics figures show 69,895 businesses were added to the UK register between July and September 2026, down 3.5 per cent on the same quarter a year earlier, with health and social care and accommodation and food services recording the steepest sectoral drops.
The headline figure of 69,895 business creations in Quarter 3 2026 marks a reversal from the previous quarter, when 79,325 new businesses were recorded — a period that had itself shown a 2.2 per cent rise compared with Quarter 2 2025. The latest ONS release, published on 29 October 2026, counts new enterprise entries on the Inter-Departmental Business Register and is intended as a timelier indicator of business activity than the annual demography series.
Health and social care saw the sharpest sectoral fall, down 26.4 per cent on Quarter 3 2025. Accommodation and food services followed with a 16.2 per cent drop. The release does not establish the causes of either decline.
The figures carry an official-statistics-in-development status, and the ONS is clear that the quarterly series should not be treated as directly equivalent to its annual business-birth measure — the one it identifies as the preferred measure of business demography. For the period covering Quarter 4 2025 to Quarter 3 2026, the ONS applied a 3.8 per cent reduction to business creations and a 10.3 per cent reduction to business closures as part of its adjustment process for reactivated business deaths and false business births. So any like-for-like comparison with the annual bulletin requires caution.
What the figures do show is a notable swing in a single quarter — from growth to contraction — in overall business creation, concentrated most heavily in two sectors that have seen significant structural change in recent years.
Source: @ONS