Revision note (24 August 2026): This page previously reported figures based on a snapshot that only captured companies currently on the register, undercounting the true total by omitting every dissolved company from the sector's history. It has been rebuilt using a full pull of the Companies House Advanced Search API covering every SIC 96020 company incorporated since the register begins, active or not. Sections that can't be verified directly from Companies House data (business model split, company size by turnover, population-adjusted regional density) have been removed rather than estimated. They will be reinstated only once backed by a real, cited source. This page is now refreshed monthly alongside the Company Register Tracker — the two share the same underlying pull and will always show matching totals.

Data Source:

Companies House Advanced Search API
Snapshot date: 19 September 2026

Classification: SIC Code 96020 (Hairdressing and other beauty treatment)

Total Companies: 159,404 limited companies (every status, full history)

Analysis Date: September 2026

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This report analyses all 159,404 limited companies ever registered under SIC code 96020 (Hairdressing and other beauty treatment) in the UK, as recorded by Companies House as of 19 September 2026 — including companies since dissolved, not just those currently active.

Active Companies

49.1%

78,304 currently active

Of the full historical register

Liquidation Rate

0.6%

877 companies

Of full historical register

2025 Incorporations

15,841

Full calendar year

Second-highest full year (2023: 15,953)

2026 So Far

10,811

Through 19 September

Partial year; straight-line run-rate about 15,100

Self-Employment (Range)

17k–210k

Depending on definition

See Section 5 for full breakdown

Key Findings

Company Status (full historical register):

Active trading: 78,304 (49.1%)
Dissolved: 80,217 (50.3%)
Liquidation: 877 (0.6%)
Other (voluntary arrangement / converted-closed): 6 (<0.1%)

Business Formation:

2025: 15,841 new incorporations — second-highest full year (2023 peak: 15,953)
2026 (through 19 September): 10,811 so far

Regional Distribution:

London: 31,965 companies with "London" in the registered address (20.1% of total)
See Section 3 for full methodology and caveats on regional matching

1. SECTOR COMPOSITION

Total Companies by Status

Status	Count	Percentage	Notes
Active	78,304	49.1%	Currently trading, on register
Dissolved	80,217	50.3%	Removed from register
Liquidation	877	0.6%	In formal insolvency process
Other statuses	6	<0.1%	Voluntary arrangement, converted-closed
TOTAL	159,404	100%	Every SIC 96020 company on record, all time

Source: Companies House Advanced Search API, 19 September 2026

Why the active rate looks different from before: a snapshot that only includes currently-registered companies will always show an active rate close to 90%, because it has already excluded every company that dissolved and dropped off the register. That's not a measure of business survival — it's an artefact of what the snapshot can see. The 49.1% figure here reflects the true proportion of every company this sector has ever produced that is still trading today.

2. BUSINESS FORMATION TRENDS

Annual Incorporations

Year	New Incorporations	Notes
2016	4,851	Confirmed, full history
2017	6,680	Confirmed, full history
2018	8,846	Confirmed, full history
2019	10,635	Confirmed, full history
2020	13,613	COVID year — still a formation increase
2021	12,551	Confirmed, full history
2022	14,700	Confirmed, full history
2023	15,953	Confirmed, full history
2024	15,613	Confirmed, full history
2025	15,841	Second-highest full year (2023: 15,953)
2026	10,811	Through 19 September — partial year

All figures are exact counts from the incorporation date field across the complete historical dataset — none are estimated or projected. Year-on-year totals for closed years can shift by a handful of companies between monthly pulls (typically under 0.1%), reflecting late-filed records and occasional Companies House data corrections rather than a change in methodology.

Formation Trends

2016–2018 vs 2023–2025:

2016–2018 total: 20,377 incorporations
2023–2025 total: 47,407 incorporations
Growth: 133%. Most of the rise came before the pandemic (2016 to 2019: 4,851 to 10,635); since 2022 annual formations have been broadly flat at roughly 14,700–15,950. Formations count new limited companies, not new workers, so this does not by itself show growth in the workforce

3. REGIONAL DISTRIBUTION

Methodology note: the figures below count companies whose registered office address contains the named city as a whole word. This is a direct, reproducible text match against real registered addresses — but it is not a formal Local Authority District boundary match (a company registered on a "Manchester Road" in a different town would be counted, for example), and it will slightly overcount denser city names. Population-adjusted density has been removed from this section until we have a verified postcode-to-region mapping — the population figures used in the previous version of this page could not be traced to a real source and have been dropped rather than reused.

Companies by Named City (registered address text match)

City	Total Companies	Active	Active %	Dissolved	Liquidation
London	31,965	14,454	45.2%	17,397	112
Manchester	4,391	1,946	44.3%	2,392	53
Birmingham	3,660	1,608	43.9%	2,024	28
Glasgow	3,303	1,617	49.0%	1,673	13
Liverpool	2,551	1,140	44.7%	1,400	11
Cardiff	2,109	687	32.6%	1,419	3
Leeds	1,813	896	49.4%	886	31
Nottingham	1,637	850	51.9%	784	3
Bristol	1,528	817	53.5%	705	6
Leicester	1,441	664	46.1%	764	13
Sheffield	1,435	674	47.0%	748	13
Derby	1,127	541	48.0%	581	5
Newcastle	1,098	571	52.0%	516	11
Bradford	1,017	483	47.5%	520	14
Southampton	991	476	48.0%	505	10
Coventry	967	413	42.7%	544	10
Wolverhampton	785	376	47.9%	407	2
Stoke-on-Trent	528	234	44.3%	291	3
Plymouth	520	250	48.1%	269	1
Portsmouth	388	193	49.7%	193	2
UK Average (full register)	159,404	78,304	49.1%	80,217	877

Source: Companies House Advanced Search API, registered office address field, text-matched against city names. Sum across these 20 cities: 63,254 companies (39.7% of the full register) — the remainder are spread across smaller towns not listed here.

Regional Observations

Active rates are consistently close to the sector-wide 49.1% across every major city — no city shows the ~90% figure previously reported, confirming that was a snapshot artefact rather than a regional pattern.
Cardiff's lower active rate (32.6%) remains the one clear outlier, essentially unchanged from last month's 32.9% — still worth a closer look at what's driving it rather than asserting a cause here. (See the shell-company claim testing page for the Companies House default-address explanation for Cardiff's address clustering specifically — likely related rather than separate: on the August pull, 1,144 of the 2,084 Cardiff-matched companies carried the Companies House default address (CF14 8LH), a placeholder rather than a real Cardiff location. The Cardiff row should be re-counted excluding that placeholder before its active rate is read as a local pattern.)

4. COMPANY AGE DISTRIBUTION

Age Distribution (exact, from incorporation date)

Age Group	Count	%	Notes
0-2 years	30,513	19.1%	Incorporated within roughly the last 2 years
3-5 years	45,858	28.8%	Incorporated roughly 2 to 5 years ago
6-10 years	50,353	31.6%	Incorporated roughly 5 to 10 years ago
11-15 years	18,523	11.6%	Incorporated roughly 10 to 15 years ago
16+ years	14,157	8.9%	Incorporated more than 15 years ago

Calculated directly from the incorporation date field against the snapshot date (19 September 2026), across all 159,404 companies regardless of current status. No estimation.

Age here is time since incorporation, not trading age: the bands include dissolved companies (about half the register), so they should not be read as the age profile of businesses currently operating.

5. SELF-EMPLOYMENT: THREE OFFICIAL MEASURES

"How many self-employed hairdressers are there?" doesn't have one answer — it has (at least) three, from three separate government sources, each measuring something genuinely different. All three are correct for what they measure. The gap between them is the finding.

Source	Figure	What it actually measures	Period
HMRC Survey of Personal Incomes (SPI)	210,000	Broadest measure — anyone with evidence of self-employment business activity classified to SIC 96020 on their tax return, including side-income, part-time activity, and cases where losses or capital allowances mean no profit was made	2022-23 and 2023-24
ONS Annual Population Survey (APS)	150,200	Occupation-based household survey — people who self-identify their main job as SOC 6221 (hairdressers & barbers, 87,000) or SOC 6222 (beauticians & related, 63,200), regardless of business registration status	April 2025 - March 2026
ONS Business Register (BRES/IDBR)	~17,000	Narrowest measure — the gap between "employment" and "employees" for VAT/PAYE-registered SIC 96020 enterprises only; captures registered business owners, not chair-renters or the wider self-employed workforce operating inside someone else's registered business	2025

Sources: HMRC FOI2026/78433 (7 August 2026); ONS FOI-2026-3659, "Self-employment trends in the hairdressing and barbering sector: 2026" (17 August 2026); ONS ad hoc AH1765/AH1788. These figures are independent of the Companies House pull above and are not refreshed on the same monthly cycle — they update only when a newer FOI response or ONS release is available.

Why this matters: the three figures span a 12.4x range depending purely on methodology, not on any real change in the underlying sector. A business-register count (like the Companies House and ONS/IDBR figures used elsewhere on this page) will always be the smallest of the three, because it only captures people who own a registered business — not the far larger population of self-employed stylists and beauticians who rent a chair, work mobile, or otherwise operate inside someone else's registered premises. Any claim about "how many self-employed people work in this sector" should state which of these three definitions it's using — none of the three numbers is more "correct" than the others, but they are not interchangeable.

6. SECTIONS REMOVED PENDING VERIFIED DATA

Company size by turnover/employees, business model split (employed vs chair rental vs hybrid), and population-adjusted regional density previously appeared in this report as estimates. Companies House's basic register data does not include turnover, employee counts, or business model — these would require either full accounts data (a much larger per-company API pull) or a genuine industry survey, neither of which we currently have. Rather than publish estimates dressed as data, these sections have been removed. They'll return if and when there's a real, citable source behind them.

7. METHODOLOGY & DATA SOURCES

Primary Data Source

Companies House:

Download date: 19 September 2026
Source: Companies House Advanced Search API
Filter: SIC Code 96020 only
Total records: 159,404 — every status, complete history since 1909

SIC Code 96020

Defined as: "Hairdressing and other beauty treatment"

Includes:

Hairdressing salons
Barber shops
Beauty salons
Nail bars/salons
Tanning salons
Massage therapy
Other beauty/grooming services

Note: This is a combined category — does not separate hair services from beauty services.

Analysis Methods

Status Distribution:

Direct count from Companies House status field, full register

Regional Analysis:

Text match of city names against the registered office address field
Not a formal Local Authority District boundary match — see caveat in Section 3
No population-adjusted density is published on this page pending a verified population source

Formation Trends:

Direct count from the incorporation date field, aggregated by year
2026 figure is partial-year (through 19 September)

Data Limitations

What This Data Shows:

Number of limited companies, all statuses, full history
Company status (active, dissolved, liquidation, etc.)
Incorporation and dissolution dates
Registered addresses

What This Data Doesn't Show:

Sole traders (not included in Companies House)
Partnerships (separate registration)
Revenue or profitability
Number of employees per company
Split between hair vs beauty services
Actual trading activity for companies marked active
Business model (employed, chair rental, hybrid)

Verification

All data directly from Companies House official source
No sampling or estimation — complete historical dataset, every status
Reproducible by anyone with Companies House API access
Raw snapshot available on request for independent verification