At the Companies House bulk snapshot dated 1 September 2026 there were 665,645 live companies on the UK register carrying at least one of the four real-estate SIC codes we track. That is the count of property companies that exist today: not the number formed last year, and not a modelled estimate. Dissolved companies are absent from the file by construction, so the figure is the live population as at that date.
Most published answers to this question are formation figures, which measure how many companies were created in a period. This page answers the other question, the one people usually mean when they ask how many buy-to-let limited companies there are. It is a stock count, taken from the monthly bulk extract of the register, and it can be rebuilt by anyone from the same free source. If you want the monthly flow instead, that is the job of the UK SPV Incorporation Index.
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The headline count, and exactly what is inside it
The 665,645 is a filtered count. We include a company if it records any of four SIC codes, deduplicated so a company holding two of them is counted once:
| SIC code | What it covers | Role |
|---|---|---|
| 68209 | Other letting and operating of own or leased real estate | The standard buy-to-let SPV code, and the headline formation series |
| 68100 | Buying and selling of own real estate | Trading and development companies |
| 68320 | Management of real estate on a fee or contract basis | Letting agents and managing agents |
| 68201 | Renting and operating of Housing Association real estate | Social housing letting, included for completeness |
So the live total is "property companies", not "buy-to-let SPVs". If you want the narrower reading, the relative weight of the four codes shows up clearly in the formation record. Across calendar year 2025 the register recorded 69,039 incorporations under 68209, 49,448 under 68100, 18,132 under 68320 and 5,055 under 68201, against a deduplicated union of 95,140. Those four per-code figures deliberately do not sum to the union: adding them double counts every company that carries more than one code, and the gap between the naive sum of 141,674 and the actual 95,140 is a measure of how common multi-code registration is.
Two limits are worth stating before any of these numbers get quoted. SIC codes are self-reported at formation and rarely revised, so they record intent rather than audited activity. And a property SPV incorporated under a generic or holding company code never appears in this count at all, which makes a SIC-filtered figure a floor rather than a ceiling. Both points are set out in the Index methodology.
Why our total is larger than the buy-to-let company figures you have seen
The most quoted UK figure for buy-to-let company stock comes from Hamptons, which reported 443,272 buy-to-let companies at the end of 2025. Ours is materially larger, and the difference is definitional rather than a dispute about the underlying register.
Hamptons applies its own definition of what makes a company a buy-to-let company. We apply a fixed, published SIC filter and count whatever the register holds under those codes, which sweeps in letting agents, managers, developers and housing association vehicles alongside landlord SPVs. Neither definition contains the other: ours includes property companies that are not buy-to-let vehicles, and it misses buy-to-let vehicles that registered under codes outside our four. The dates differ too, end-2025 against a 1 September 2026 snapshot, and the register grew in between.
The practical consequence is simple. Do not treat the two as competing estimates of the same quantity, and do not subtract one from the other. Quote whichever definition matches your question, and say which one you used.
Where the 665,645 companies are registered
Every company on the register has a registered office. Reducing that postcode to a postcode area and mapping it to a standard region gives the geography of the stock. This is where the directors and their advisers sit, which is not necessarily where the property is, and postcode areas straddle regional boundaries, so read the table as a distribution rather than as exact regional counts.
| Region | Live property companies | Share of the register | Share of the last 12 months' formations |
|---|---|---|---|
| London | 224,647 | 33.7% | 35.3% |
| North West | 69,870 | 10.5% | 11.3% |
| South East | 65,906 | 9.9% | 8.5% |
| West Midlands | 50,950 | 7.7% | 8.5% |
| East of England | 46,976 | 7.1% | 6.4% |
| Yorkshire and The Humber | 41,774 | 6.3% | 6.6% |
| South West | 40,428 | 6.1% | 4.8% |
| East Midlands | 33,624 | 5.1% | 5.0% |
| Scotland | 31,335 | 4.7% | 5.1% |
| Wales | 19,472 | 2.9% | 2.9% |
| North East | 16,576 | 2.5% | 2.6% |
| Northern Ireland | 9,326 | 1.4% | 1.2% |
| Other or unknown | 14,761 | 2.2% | 1.8% |
| Total | 665,645 | 100% | 100% |
Three things stand out. London alone holds a third of the register, and its 224,647 companies are more than the next three regions put together (186,726). The concentration is not softening: London's share of the last twelve months of formations, 35.3%, runs slightly ahead of its 33.7% share of the existing stock. And the North West sits second on both measures, ahead of the South East on stock and further ahead on recent formations, which is what you would expect from a region where yields rather than capital values drive the buying.
At the other end, Northern Ireland's 9,326 live companies are 1.4% of the register. The "other or unknown" row, 14,761 companies, is the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man and registrations with a blank or unparseable postcode. Which regions have gained and lost share of new formations over the past three years is the subject of where UK property companies are being formed.
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The age profile: a young register
The most revealing cut of the stock is not where the companies are but when they were formed. Taking the last 36 complete months of the snapshot, September 2023 to August 2026, 230,261 companies incorporated in that window are still live, which is 34.6% of the whole register. Roughly one in three live UK property companies is under three years old.
Extend the window and the pattern holds. 357,832 live companies, 53.8% of the register, were incorporated in 2021 or later. Only 155,319, or 23.3%, date from before 2016. The single largest cohort still on the register is 2025, with 88,028 companies.
Read those together and the shape is obvious. This is not a long-established population of property companies. It is a register reshaped by a decade of tax change, in which the majority of vehicles were created after the Section 24 finance cost restriction began to bite. Formation flow tells the same story from the other end: incorporations under 68209 ran at 19,733 in 2016 and 69,039 in 2025, a 3.5-fold rise, while the four-code union went from 33,040 to 95,140, up 188.0%. For anyone weighing that decision now, the arithmetic rather than the headcount is what matters, and it is set out in limited company versus personal ownership and Section 24 versus incorporation.
One caveat on the age figures. The bulk file holds only live companies, so every cohort has already been thinned by dissolutions, and older cohorts have been thinned hardest. The under-three-years share is therefore a genuine feature of the live register, but it overstates how young the formation flow itself was, because more of the recent formations have survived to be counted. The banded profile, and why a live register cannot yield an average company lifespan, are worked through in how old UK property companies are.
Stock is growing, flow has cooled
A live count says nothing about direction on its own, so one flow figure belongs here for context. Over the twelve months to June 2026, the latest settled month, there were 90,390 incorporations across the four codes, of which 66,312 were under the buy-to-let code 68209. The stock is still rising because those formations comfortably exceed dissolutions.
Momentum has turned though. June 2026 recorded 4,840 incorporations under 68209 against 6,054 in June 2025, down 20.1% year on year. June is quoted rather than the newest month on the file because the register keeps absorbing recent incorporations for a couple of months after they happen, so the two newest months in any release read low until they settle. The monthly series, the regional trend and the net formation rate all sit on the UK SPV Incorporation Index, refreshed monthly with a published methodology and a downloadable CSV.
What the count does not tell you
- How many properties are involved. The register counts vehicles, not dwellings. One company may hold nothing at all and another may hold fifty units.
- How many landlords are behind them. One investor commonly runs several SPVs, so the company count is not a headcount of incorporated landlords.
- Whether a company is trading. Plenty of incorporations never buy anything, and the register does not distinguish them from active portfolios.
- What structure sits underneath. Share classes, holding companies and joint ventures are invisible in a SIC-filtered count. See property joint venture SPV structures for that layer.
Where that leaves the count
665,645 live property companies on the UK register at 1 September 2026, a third of them in London and a third of them under three years old. If the reason you are counting is to work out whether you should be one of them, the relevant numbers are yours rather than the register's: our SPV company hub covers how the vehicle works, and the buy-to-let limited company guide covers the tax comparison in full. Companies House publishes the underlying bulk data free under the Open Government Licence v3.0, and our full method is documented alongside the Index.