Why Most UK Companies Do Not Disclose Turnover

Companies House filing exemptions  ·  Small company rules  ·  What data is available instead  ·  The April 2028 P&L reform

1. The short answer

UK company law divides companies into four size categories: micro-entity, small, medium, and large. Only medium and large companies are legally required to include a profit and loss statement - which contains turnover - in their annual accounts filed at Companies House. Micro-entities and small companies are permitted to file a balance sheet only. Since the vast majority of UK limited companies qualify as small or micro-entity, turnover figures are simply not available for most of them. No data provider, however sophisticated, can supply revenue figures that were never disclosed.

2. The legal framework: why the exemption exists

The exemption originates from the Companies Act 2006 and the underlying EU Accounting Directive it implemented. The rationale was that requiring very small businesses to publish detailed financial information creates administrative burden disproportionate to the public interest benefit. A sole director running a small service business has a legitimate commercial interest in keeping revenue private from competitors, customers, and suppliers. The filing exemptions were designed to preserve that confidentiality while maintaining minimum transparency through balance sheet disclosure.

A company qualifies for a size category if it meets two of the three criteria for that category. The thresholds below apply for accounting periods beginning on or after 6 April 2025, following changes made under the Companies Act 2006 (as amended by the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023).

Size thresholds and P&L disclosure requirements

The previous small company turnover threshold was £10.2 million and the micro-entity threshold was £632,000. These were increased for accounting periods beginning on or after 6 April 2025, meaning more companies now qualify for the exemption than before.

Abridged and filleted accounts

Small companies that do prepare a profit and loss statement are not required to include it in what they file at Companies House. The practice of filleting accounts - preparing full accounts for shareholders and HMRC but removing the profit and loss statement before filing publicly - is entirely legal and widely used. Micro-entities can file a simplified balance sheet with minimal notes and no P&L. This means even some companies that technically do have accessible revenue figures choose to keep them off the public register.

3. The April 2028 P&L filing reform

For several years there was an expectation that UK company law would change to require all companies, including micro-entities and small companies, to file a full profit and loss statement at Companies House. This was included in the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 as part of a wider package of transparency reforms designed to help tackle economic crime and improve the quality of data on the register.

After being paused in January 2026 following concern from small business groups about commercial confidentiality, the government confirmed on 9 June 2026 that the reform will proceed - but with a significant change. Small companies and micro-entities will be required to file profit and loss accounts from April 2028, but will be permitted to opt out of having them published on the public register. Companies must still file the P&L with Companies House, where it will be accessible to HMRC and law enforcement, but can choose to keep it off the publicly visible register. Details of how the opt-out will work in practice are yet to be confirmed by Companies House.

4. What financial data is available instead

The absence of turnover does not mean the absence of useful financial data. Balance sheet information is available for most companies that file electronically, and it can reveal a great deal about scale, financial health, leverage, and trajectory even without revenue figures.

For many analysis tasks, balance sheet data provides sufficient signal. A company with £3 million in total assets and strong year-on-year asset growth tells you something meaningful about its scale and trajectory even without a revenue figure. Debt-to-equity ratios support credit and risk assessment. Asset growth rates can serve as revenue proxies for screening purposes where directional insight is enough.

Where turnover is available - either because a company is medium or large, or because a small company has voluntarily filed full accounts - structured data providers extract and include it. Some APIs allow filtering specifically for companies that have disclosed P&L figures, which is useful when you need revenue data and are willing to accept a smaller filtered universe of results.

5. Can turnover be estimated from a balance sheet?

Occasionally people ask whether turnover can be derived or estimated from balance sheet figures. The short answer is no, not reliably. Trade debtors can give a rough indication of revenue run rate if you know payment terms, but this is speculative and depends on assumptions about debtor days, payment patterns, and the mix of cash and credit sales. For micro-entity balance sheets the level of aggregation is too high to make any meaningful inference. Accountants and analysts who attempt turnover estimation from abbreviated accounts consistently note that the results are too unreliable to act on. The most practical approach is to work with the data that does exist - assets, liabilities, equity, and growth rates - rather than trying to reconstruct what was deliberately not filed.

Turnover disclosure rules are defined by UK company size thresholds and filing exemptions...