In the twelve months to August 2026, London registered offices account for 35.3% of all UK property company formations, more than three times the share of the next region. That is 30,397 companies of 86,109 across the UK in our regional extract of the Companies House register. The North West is second on 11.3%, with the South East and the West Midlands tied on 8.5%.
One caveat belongs at the top rather than in a footnote. This extract comes from the live Companies House register, so companies formed during the window and since dissolved are simply absent, and postcode areas do not line up neatly with region boundaries. Both effects are broadly consistent across regions and months, which is why our Landlord Tax Index methodology is explicit that regional figures are best read as shares and as trends in shares, not as exact regional counts. Every headline number on this page is therefore a share. Counts appear in the table as a secondary column, labelled as register-derived, because readers ask for them.
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The full regional table
Thirteen rows: the twelve ITL1 regions (nine English regions plus Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) and an Other or unknown bucket for the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man and postcodes that could not be parsed. Shares are of formations in the twelve months to August 2026. The live company column is the count on the register at the September 2026 bulk snapshot.
| Region | Share of formations, 12m to Aug 2026 | Formations, 12m to Aug 2026 (register-derived) | Live companies at Sep 2026 snapshot (register-derived) |
|---|---|---|---|
| London | 35.3% | 30,397 | 224,647 |
| North West | 11.3% | 9,706 | 69,870 |
| South East | 8.5% | 7,298 | 65,906 |
| West Midlands | 8.5% | 7,288 | 50,950 |
| Yorkshire and The Humber | 6.6% | 5,655 | 41,774 |
| East of England | 6.4% | 5,547 | 46,976 |
| Scotland | 5.1% | 4,414 | 31,335 |
| East Midlands | 5.0% | 4,327 | 33,624 |
| South West | 4.8% | 4,167 | 40,428 |
| Wales | 2.9% | 2,535 | 19,472 |
| North East | 2.6% | 2,238 | 16,576 |
| Other / unknown | 1.8% | 1,542 | 14,761 |
| Northern Ireland | 1.2% | 995 | 9,326 |
| UK total | 100% | 86,109 | 665,645 |
Read the two count columns as internally consistent with each other and with the share column, and not as a national total. Our national gross series, which counts every incorporation including companies since dissolved, records 90,390 property company incorporations in the trailing twelve months to June 2026. The difference is the survivorship gap, and it is the reason the regional file is capped at a 36-month window where attrition is smallest.
London's dominance, and what it does not mean
London's 35.3% share of the last twelve months is 3.1 times the North West's 11.3%. Put another way, London registers more property companies than the North West, South East, West Midlands and Yorkshire combined, whose shares total 34.9%. There is no other region within reach.
The more interesting figure is the comparison between flow and stock. London holds 33.7% of the live company stock (224,647 of 665,645) but 35.3% of the last twelve months of formations. New formation is running slightly ahead of the accumulated base, so London's concentration is still increasing, not unwinding. That is the opposite of the story usually told about landlords leaving the capital. The stock those formations feed into, 665,645 live companies and what the total does and does not include, is set out in how many buy-to-let limited companies there are in the UK.
Before anyone draws a conclusion about where property is being bought, note what the region actually records: the postcode of the registered office. That is frequently the owner's home address, and very often the accountant's or formation agent's address, which is why registered office choice is a live decision in its own right (see registered office address for a property SPV). A Bradford terrace held in a company registered in EC1 counts as London here. London's share is therefore partly a genuine concentration of property investors and partly a concentration of the professional infrastructure that files their companies. Nothing on this page tells you where the bricks are.
The movers: shares over 36 months
The regional file carries monthly formations for 36 months, from September 2023 to August 2026. Comparing the first twelve months of that window (September 2023 to August 2024) with the last twelve (September 2025 to August 2026) gives a clean read on which regions are taking a bigger slice. Total formations in the window rose from 61,913 to 86,109, an increase of 39.1%, so almost every region grew. The question is who grew faster than that.
| Region | Share, first 12m of window | Share, last 12m of window | Change in share | Growth in formations |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| North West | 10.8% | 11.3% | +0.5 pts | +45.0% |
| West Midlands | 8.0% | 8.5% | +0.5 pts | +47.8% |
| London | 34.9% | 35.3% | +0.4 pts | +40.5% |
| Scotland | 4.9% | 5.1% | +0.3 pts | +46.9% |
| Yorkshire and The Humber | 6.4% | 6.6% | +0.2 pts | +42.7% |
| Wales | 2.8% | 2.9% | +0.1 pts | +44.9% |
| North East | 2.6% | 2.6% | no change | +37.3% |
| East Midlands | 5.1% | 5.0% | -0.1 pts | +35.8% |
| Northern Ireland | 1.2% | 1.2% | -0.1 pts | +30.1% |
| Other / unknown | 2.0% | 1.8% | -0.2 pts | +25.0% |
| South East | 9.0% | 8.5% | -0.5 pts | +31.4% |
| South West | 5.3% | 4.8% | -0.5 pts | +26.9% |
| East of England | 6.9% | 6.4% | -0.5 pts | +29.3% |
The pattern is coherent enough to be worth naming, and small enough that it should not be oversold. The fastest-growing regions are the West Midlands (+47.8%), Scotland (+46.9%), the North West (+45.0%) and Wales (+44.9%), all well ahead of the 39.1% UK rate. The slowest are the South West (+26.9%), the East of England (+29.3%), Northern Ireland (+30.1%) and the South East (+31.4%), all well behind it.
Strip out London and the shape is a tilt away from the southern regions outside the capital and towards the Midlands, the North West, Scotland and Wales. But the largest single share movement in either direction is half a percentage point across three years. Nobody is being displaced. If you want a fair one-line summary: the distribution of property company formation is remarkably stable, and what movement there is runs north and west.
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Reading these figures honestly
Three limits, all of them structural rather than fixable:
- Survivorship. The bulk register shows live companies only. Formations in the window that have already been dissolved are missing, and the gap widens with the age of the month. Our methodology publishes the measured size of it: the bulk file captures 99.9% of gross formations for the most recent settled month, 85.9% across the full 36-month window, and 70.6% for the oldest six months. That is precisely why the share comparison above is stated as a share and why the window stops at 36 months.
- Postcode areas straddle regions. Postcode areas are a postal construct, not an administrative one, and several span an ITL1 boundary, most visibly around London and the Home Counties. The mapping is deterministic and published, so the error is consistent month to month rather than random, but it exists.
- Registered office is not property location. Covered above, and the single most common misreading of this dataset.
The full method, the four SIC codes used and the region mapping are set out in the Landlord Tax Index methodology on the research hub. The source is Companies House Basic Company Data, published monthly under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
The context these regional shares sit inside
Regional share is a slice of a national trend that is far larger than any of the movements above. Across the decade from 2016 to 2025, annual property company incorporations on our national series rose from 33,040 to 95,140, an increase of 188%. The 39.1% growth across our 36-month regional window is the tail end of that curve, and the Landlord Tax Index tracks it monthly with dissolutions and a net formation rate alongside.
Which is the useful frame for anyone reading this looking for a signal about their own position. The regional table tells you that forming a property company is now normal everywhere in the UK, and slightly more normal in the North West and the Midlands than it was three years ago. It does not tell you whether it is right for you. That is settled by your own tax rate, the interest you cannot currently relieve and the intended holding period, which is what the SPV company hub is built around, along with the mechanics of incorporating a property portfolio and what the April 2027 property income rates do to that calculation. Formation itself is the cheap part, as the SPV formation cost breakdown sets out.
The distribution in one line
London 35.3%, North West 11.3%, South East and West Midlands 8.5% each, in the twelve months to August 2026. Over the 36 months we can see, the North West and West Midlands have gained half a point of share each, the South East, South West and East of England have lost half a point each, and the ordering of the table has not changed. Treat all of it as a distribution of registered offices, read as shares, and not as a map of where property is being bought.