New UK IT consultancy companies rose 43.4% between 2016 and 2025

Each bar shows the number of new companies incorporated in that calendar year under SIC code 62020, information technology consultancy activities. Only complete calendar years are shown. IT consultancy is the single largest contractor sector by company formation and the clearest signal of the limited-company route into independent work.

All-contractor company formations (the deduplicated union across all 13 SIC codes) by year, with the two off-payroll (IR35) reform dates marked: April 2017, when the rules extended to the public sector, and April 2021, when they extended to medium and large private sector engagers, the point at which most of the contractor market became affected.

• Public sector reform era (Apr 2017 to Apr 2021): +26.2% in trailing-12-month union formations (+6.0% CAGR over 4 years).
• Private sector reform era (Apr 2021 to latest): +31.8% in trailing-12-month union formations (+5.6% CAGR over 5.08 years).

As independent context, HMRC's own published estimate is that the private sector reform raised an additional £4.2bn in tax, National Insurance and the Apprenticeship Levy between October 2019 to March 2023, affecting around 120,000 contractors. That figure is a separate HMRC estimate, not derived from this dataset; the formations trend above is this site's own independent read on the same question. HMRC, Impacts of the 2021 off-payroll working rules reform in the private and voluntary sectors (updated).

Incorporations. For each month, we query the Companies House Advanced Search API for companies incorporated under each of the 13 contractor-heavy SIC codes spanning IT and software (Division 62), management consultancy (Division 70), engineering and technical consulting (Division 71), and creative and design work (Divisions 73 and 74). The deduplicated union counts each company once even where it registers under multiple of these SIC codes. Counts are gross: the Advanced Search API counts companies by incorporation date across all company statuses, so companies that have since been dissolved are still included in the year they were formed and the series carries no survivorship bias. The most recent 2 months are provisional and excluded from headline figures.

Proxy, not a census. The index measures limited-company formation in contractor-heavy sectors as a proxy for personal service company (PSC) activity. It does not capture umbrella workers, sole traders, or contractors working through an existing company, and a new incorporation is not always a newly self-employed person. It is best read as a directional signal of the limited-company contractor market.

Licence. Companies House data is published under the Open Government Licence v3.0, which permits free reuse with attribution. This index, and the CSV export below, are free to cite and republish with attribution to Contractor Tax Accountants.

Updated. Incorporations to Apr 2026 (settled data). Data generated Jul 2026.

• Companies House Advanced Search API (Companies House)

Download the incorporation data (CSV)

Free to cite and republish with attribution to Contractor Tax Accountants. This page is a data summary and does not constitute tax advice on any individual situation.