How to get a list of UK companies by location
“Every agency in Manchester” sounds like the simplest filter in B2B data, and it is the one most quietly misread. The company register carries a registered office, not a trading address — and a large, measurable slice of it is registered at accountants, company-formation agents and mail-forwarding offices. This page shows how a location-filtered list is actually built, and puts a number on how far the register's idea of “where” sits from yours.
What the register gives you, and what it doesn't
| Field | Published for every live company? | What it actually means |
|---|---|---|
| Registered office town, county, postcode | Yes — free, in the bulk download and the API | The address for official post. Frequently the company's own office; frequently its accountant's or formation agent's |
| Trading address | No — the field does not exist | Anything sold as one is inferred from elsewhere. Ask any vendor which source, and how it was verified |
| Branches, sites or catchment | No | A multi-site business appears once, at one postcode, however many places it works from |
What we counted
The cohort is 231,476 active UK digital, IT and marketing agencies taken from the Companies House snapshot of 1 July 2026 (SIC 62012, 62020, 70210, 73110, 73120 and 74100). Every figure below is counted from that file, not sampled and not estimated. 231,369 of them carry a registered postcode, spread across 113,364 distinct postcodes — and 89,844 of those postcodes hold exactly one company. It is a long tail with a very sharp head.
| Busiest registered postcode | Area | Companies | Share of cohort |
|---|---|---|---|
| WC2H 9JQ | London WC2 | 6,888 | 3.0% |
| EC1V 2NX | London EC1 | 5,642 | 2.4% |
| N1 7GU | London N1 | 3,259 | 1.4% |
| EC2A 4NE | London EC2 | 2,913 | 1.3% |
| W1W 5PF | London W1 | 2,258 | 1.0% |
| WC1N 3AX | London WC1 | 1,347 | 0.6% |
| IP28 7DE | Suffolk | 1,281 | 0.6% |
| W1W 7LT | London W1 | 894 | 0.4% |
| WC2A 2JR | London WC2 | 877 | 0.4% |
| BH21 7SB | Dorset | 810 | 0.3% |
Ten addresses, 26,169 companies — 11.3% of the whole cohort. The top 100 postcodes account for 41,011 (17.7%), and 69 postcodes hold 100 or more companies each, covering 38,498 companies (16.6%). We don't name the occupants: the register gives us the postcode counts, not a verified occupier, so naming them would be an assertion rather than a measurement.
The same pattern, town by town
London holds 64,394 of the cohort — 27.8% of every agency-sector company in the UK, by registered address. But the concentration inside a town matters more than its size, and it varies wildly: in some towns the busiest single postcode is a rounding error, and in others it is half the town's entire list.
| Registered town | Companies | Distinct postcodes | Busiest postcode | Share of the town at that one postcode |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| London | 64,394 | 16,969 | WC2H 9JQ | 10.5% |
| Manchester | 3,704 | 1,857 | M12 6AE | 5.1% |
| Bristol | 2,757 | 1,666 | BS2 0JA | 2.2% |
| Birmingham | 2,707 | 1,560 | B3 1QS | 2.4% |
| Leeds | 2,410 | 1,245 | LS25 1NB | 10.9% |
| Glasgow | 2,173 | 1,169 | G2 1BP | 15.0% |
| Reading | 2,103 | 1,250 | RG10 0RQ | 3.0% |
| Edinburgh | 1,850 | 933 | EH2 4AN | 15.3% |
| Milton Keynes | 1,812 | 1,019 | MK12 5NN | 1.8% |
| Nottingham | 1,664 | 1,035 | NG2 7BA | 2.6% |
| Watford | 1,215 | 449 | WD17 1HP | 31.5% |
| Cardiff | 1,131 | 535 | CF14 8LH | 16.7% |
| Bolton | 1,111 | 347 | BL6 6HG | 45.0% |
| Warrington | 1,094 | 348 | WA1 1RG | 50.2% |
These are the ten largest towns by registered address, plus four more from the top twenty picked because their concentration is extreme — not a top-fourteen list. Town is the registered town exactly as filed, so a single address can appear under more than one spelling — which is why the postcode counts above and the town counts here differ slightly for the same address. Both are counted from the same file.
Three things this should change about your brief
First, ask for the concentration number with the list. A Warrington cut of this cohort is 50.2% one postcode; a Bristol cut is 2.2%. Those two lists deserve completely different levels of trust as location lists, and nothing on the file tells you that unless someone counts it. Second, filter by postcode area, not by town name, wherever you can — town is free text as filed, with spelling and boundary variants, while the postcode is structured and joins cleanly to anything else you own. Third, decide what you want location to mean before you buy: “registered here” is a legitimate and often useful filter — it is where the post and the accountant are — but if you need “operates here”, the register alone cannot give it to you, and any vendor implying otherwise is selling confidence rather than data.
Want a location-filtered cut of the UK register? Give us the geography — postcode areas, towns, counties or a region — plus the register filters you care about: SIC codes or industry, company age, size band, status. You get one clean, de-duplicated CSV, the mass-registration concentration counted for your specific cut, and websites resolved and graded where they exist — within 48 hours, fixed price from £149, quoted before you pay.
What we deliberately don't do
We don't sell a “trading address” column, because we can't source one honestly for every row. We don't sell named individuals, email addresses or direct dials — company-level data only, a deliberate GDPR stance. And we don't quietly strip the high-density postcodes to make a list look more local than it is: they stay in, flagged, and you decide. Each run is a dated snapshot of a register that changes daily, and we say so rather than implying continuous monitoring.
Want to see the output before commissioning a run? UK Digital & Marketing Agencies — Verified + Buying Signals. 1,596 established UK agencies, every row with a website verified against the Companies House record and at least one live buying signal. £99 one-off, with a free 50-row sample so you can check the quality first.
Frequently asked questions
Can you get a list of UK companies by town, city or postcode?
Yes — the registered office address is one of the few fields Companies House publishes for every live company, so town, county and postcode filters are cheap and reliable to build. What they filter is the address the company files with the register, which is not always the address it works from. We build the cut you ask for, then tell you how much of it sits at mass-registration addresses so you can judge how location-like the list really is. Any postcode area, town, county or radius-style grouping can be combined with SIC code, incorporation date, accounts band and company status in the same row.
Does a registered address tell you where the business actually operates?
Often, but far from always, and the register itself shows how often. Across 231,476 active UK agency-sector companies, the ten busiest registered postcodes hold 26,169 of them — 11.3% of an entire industry at ten addresses, which are company-formation, accountancy and mail-forwarding offices rather than ten enormous agencies. At the other end, 89,844 postcodes hold exactly one company. So a location filter on the register is a good proxy for a lot of the list and a bad one for a concentrated minority, and the honest thing a vendor can do is tell you which rows are which instead of quietly selling you the whole thing as a local list.
How do you handle mass-registration and formation-agent addresses?
We count them and flag them rather than delete them. In this cohort 69 postcodes hold 100 or more companies each, covering 38,498 companies — 16.6% of the cohort. Those rows are still real companies and may well be exactly who you want; they simply aren't evidence of a local presence. You get the concentration figure for your own cut, the flag on the affected rows, and the choice. Where we've resolved a company to its website, the contact page URL ships in the file too, so a trading address can be corroborated by hand on the rows that matter to you.
Can you filter by trading address instead of registered address?
Not as a register field, because no such field exists — Companies House holds the registered office and nothing else. Anyone selling a UK trading-address list is inferring it from somewhere else, and you should ask them where. What we can do is give you the registered address with the concentration flag above, plus the resolved website where one exists, which is the practical route to a trading location for the rows that justify the effort. We'd rather explain that limit at scoping than have you discover it after paying.
What does a location-filtered list cost?
Fixed prices from £149, quoted before you pay, delivered as clean CSV within 48 hours of payment. Tell us the geography you want — postcode areas, towns, counties or a whole region — plus the register filters like SIC codes, company age and size band, and the quote comes back before any money moves. Company-level data only: no named individuals, no scraped emails, no direct dials, by design rather than as a roadmap gap.
Related: how to get a list by SIC code or industry, by the technology a company's site runs, or of newly registered UK companies. The full UK company data providers guide compares the routes end to end.