FOI reference: FOI-2026-3773
You asked
I am looking for a dataset outlining the number of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) in the UK, between 2019 and 2023. Ideally the following characteristic information would also be made available:
Region the SME is located.
The number of employees within the organisation, ideally in the following categories: 1-9 employees, 10-49 employees, 50-249 employees, sole traders or a charity organisations.
The sector the SME operates in.
We said
Thank you for your Freedom of Information request.
We are unable to produce this dataset for you as individual level data is confidential. Section 39 of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 (SRSA) renders it a criminal offence to disclose information held by the Statistics Board (ONS) for statistical purposes that would identify an individual or a body corporate. As we are prohibited by law from publishing statistics in which individual businesses can be identified, Section 44(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) applies.
However, you may be interested in an annual publication, that we produce, called UK Business: Activity, size and location. The information in the publication is taken from the Inter Departmental Business Register (IDBR) which holds all UK businesses registered for VAT and/or PAYE. In addition to the publication, these data are also available on the NOMIS data explorer tool. The data available here are from March 2010 up to the latest data available, which is, March 2026. Using NOMIS you can break the data down into aggregated tables by geography, industry, legal status and either employment or turnover size bands. Information on the number of businesses is available here but not the number of employees. To find the data, please choose the "query data" option on the homepage and then the "UK business counts" option. Using NOMIS will not give you the exact information you require (it holds "count" data only, there are no employee numbers, it also has employment rather than employee size bands) but it may be close enough to help you.
The other option is to contact our data service team via idbrdas@ons.gov.uk to discuss a bespoke piece of analysis. You will need to contact them if you require employee numbers and the exact employee size bands in your request. As this request is quite detailed and covers several years, it will take longer than an hour to produce and will be chargeable. Please note that we advise caution when using employment data from the IDBR as it comes from several sources, mainly administrative sources, that we cannot validate.