Sort the 665,645 live UK property companies on the Companies House register at 1 September 2026 by the year each was incorporated, and the distribution comes out badly skewed towards the present. 32.0 per cent of them (213,208 companies) were incorporated in 2024 or later, and the median live company dates from 2021. The register of property companies is, overwhelmingly, a recent creation.
That single fact is worth sitting with before any of the detail. Half of every property company currently on the register is five years old or younger. Whatever you think the landlord company sector is, it is mostly a thing that happened after 2020.
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The age profile, banded by decade
Grouping all 665,645 live companies by incorporation year gives the following distribution. Each share is that band's count divided by the live total at the snapshot date.
| Incorporated | Live companies | Share of live register |
|---|---|---|
| Before 2010 | 97,188 | 14.6% |
| 2010 to 2015 | 58,131 | 8.7% |
| 2016 to 2020 | 152,494 | 22.9% |
| 2021 to 2023 | 144,624 | 21.7% |
| 2024 to date | 213,208 | 32.0% |
| All live companies | 665,645 | 100% |
Source: Companies House Basic Company Data (bulk), snapshot 1 September 2026, SIC codes 68100, 68201, 68209 and 68320, deduplicated. The 2024 band covers two full calendar years plus 2026 to the snapshot date, so it is a shorter window than the two bands above it and still the largest.
Read down the table and the shape is clear. The 2010 to 2015 band is the smallest of the five, at 8.7 per cent, despite covering six full years. Everything from 2016 onwards is bigger, and each successive band is denser than the last per year of coverage. Cumulatively, 73.5 per cent of the live register (489,064 companies) was incorporated in the last ten calendar years, and 46.8 per cent (311,519) in the last five.
The long tail nobody sees
At the other end, the register has genuine antiques. 150 live companies in these SIC codes were incorporated before 1900, and the oldest surviving incorporation year in the snapshot is 1856, represented by a single company. They answer a question people reasonably ask: yes, a property company can run for a hundred and seventy years. The constraint on a company's life is not a statutory clock, it is whether anyone keeps filing for it.
What the youth of the register tells you
The obvious reading is that the property-company population is dominated by the post-Section-24 cohort. 510,326 live companies, 76.7 per cent of the register, were incorporated in 2016 or later, which is to say after the July 2015 announcement of the finance-cost restriction and either side of its phase-in from April 2017. Three quarters of the companies holding UK property today did not exist when landlords could still deduct mortgage interest in full. If you want the mechanics of the rule that reshaped this population, they are set out on our Section 24 hub, and the formation counts year by year across the phase-in are in what Section 24 actually did to company formations.
The less obvious reading is the more important one, and it is a warning. A live register over-represents recent years for a reason that has nothing to do with real growth: recent cohorts have had less time to lose members. A company incorporated in 2005 has had twenty-one years in which to be struck off; one incorporated in 2025 has had months. Some of the steepness in that table is genuine expansion in formations, and some of it is simply the shape any live register takes. You cannot separate the two from a snapshot, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
What you can take from it safely is a statement about the present, not about the past: the property companies that exist right now are mostly young. That matters commercially, because a register dominated by companies under five years old is a register full of first accounting periods, first refinances and first extraction decisions rather than mature structures. The practical questions that follow are covered in the SPV company hub and, for the running side of it, in our guide to property company running costs.
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Why "average lifespan" is the wrong question to ask this data
People search for the average age or average lifespan of a limited company and expect a single number back. We cannot give one from this dataset, and neither can anyone else working from a live register, so it is worth being explicit about why.
A live snapshot contains only survivors. Every company that was incorporated and has since been dissolved is absent from all 665,645 rows. If a thousand property companies were formed in 2012 and four hundred have since been struck off, the snapshot shows six hundred, and the ages you can compute from those six hundred are the ages of the ones that lasted. Averaging them gives you the average age of survivors, which is systematically longer than the average life of the original cohort and rises the further back you look. Presenting that as a lifespan would be straightforwardly wrong.
Answering the real question needs a cohort study: fix the population at incorporation, follow every member forward, and record the date each one leaves the register. That is a different piece of work from a snapshot, and it is not what the bulk product supports on its own. The survivorship caveat is stated in full in the Landlord Tax Index methodology, which also sets out the SIC definition and the deduplication rule behind the counts on this page.
What the dissolution series does tell us
What we can measure directly is exits, because dissolutions are counted as they happen rather than inferred from who is left. On the Companies House Advanced Search dissolution series that sits behind the Index, 45,622 property companies were dissolved in the twelve settled months to June 2026. The comparable figure for the twelve months to June 2025 was 36,494, so exits ran roughly 25 per cent higher year on year.
| Twelve months to | Property companies dissolved |
|---|---|
| June 2025 | 36,494 |
| June 2026 | 45,622 |
Source: Companies House Advanced Search API, company_status=dissolved, combined-SIC query per month, deduplicated across the four codes. Both windows end in June because Companies House is still indexing the two months after it, and a month read as complete before it is complete always reads low.
Two honest limits on that. First, a dissolution count on its own is not a failure rate: it has to be read against how large the population at risk was in each period, and a growing register mechanically produces more exits even at a constant risk. Second, dissolution is not the same as distress. Companies are struck off because a portfolio was sold, because a structure was consolidated, or because a shell formed for a purchase that never completed was tidied away, as well as because something went wrong. The tax consequences differ sharply between those cases, which is the subject of how to close a property limited company.
How to use the age profile
If you are weighing up whether to hold property in a company, the age of other people's companies is not evidence for or against it. What decides it is the size of the latent gain in the properties you would move and how much interest you are currently paying with no relief for it, and that arithmetic is covered in the SPV structure and tax guide rather than in a register statistic.
Where the profile is genuinely useful is as context. It tells you that the company route is no longer unusual, that most of the companies doing it are young enough to still be working out their first-cycle decisions, and that the register turns over at a scale of tens of thousands of exits a year. It also tells you what the numbers cannot do, which is often the more valuable half.
The profile in one line
Of 665,645 live UK property companies at 1 September 2026: 32.0 per cent were formed in 2024 or later, 73.5 per cent in the last ten calendar years, 14.6 per cent before 2010, and the median one dates from 2021. There is no defensible average lifespan in that, because the companies that would set it are the ones the register has already forgotten.
All figures on this page are derived from Companies House Basic Company Data, the free monthly bulk product, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0, snapshotted 1 September 2026. Anyone with the same file can reproduce them. The definitions, the dedup rule and the survivorship caveat are all in the Landlord Tax Index methodology, and the underlying company records are searchable on the Companies House register.