Forty-five sectors have at least 100 handovers at substantial companies since 2016. Thinner sectors are in the data but left off the page rather than quoted. Your age is never in the address of this page, so a link you share carries the sector and nothing else.
Who owns those companies now
This is read from each company’s current entry, not from a record of a transaction. The register does not say that a sale took place; it says who holds 25 per cent or more today. A corporate owner appearing after an individual departs looks like a sale. Where its name shares a distinctive word with the company’s own, or carries the departing owner’s surname, it is counted as a holding company instead. Across all substantial companies that takes the unconnected-company share from per cent of handovers to . It is a test on words in names and it will be wrong at the margins in both directions.
Who owns the sector today
Why I counted this
Magnus Wood. I was born on the edge of Generation X. Three times at the top of a business. Left three times, not always when I chose. If you’re trying to hold your ground or work out what comes after, I’ve had to find my way through both.
I built Gen X at Work because I couldn’t find one place that brought together the stories, the experiences and the evidence of working life in our fifties and sixties. What it takes to lead. What happens when you leave. What it takes to get back.
I wanted somewhere you could recognise your own experience, get a clearer view of where you stand and begin to work out where to go next.
Most firms buy attention. I build the thing that earns it, and the engine that turns it into pipeline. This page is the thing. The letters that took it to owners in their own industries are the engine. If you want both for your own firm, say so, and I will tell you whether there is a count worth making in your market.
If it’s your name on the company, and you’re working out when to let go or what comes after, I’d like to hear about it. You don’t need to have worked it all out.
me@magnuswood.co.uk
Nothing you share will be published without your permission.
Substantial companies now owned by an unconnected company, by the year the owner leftAll sectors. Read from the current entry, not from a record of sale.
The peak is 2021. 2022 and 2023 fell and the count has not returned to that level. A cessation can be filed late, so the most recent years understate. 2026 is a part year and is left out. The regime began in 2016, so the earliest years are partly a backlog of first-time filings.
The spreadSubstantial companies, by the sector of the company. Each sector is its own address.
What this does not show
Why they let go. The register records that control ended, not the reason. Sale, gift, dilution, retirement, illness and death file identically. Death cannot be separated out, so at the older end some of what looks like an exit is a bereavement.
What it was worth. No price, no terms, no multiple. None of that is public for a private company. The count says how often and at what age, never for how much.
A baseline. The regime began in 2016. The earliest years are partly a backlog of first-time filings rather than a true rate.
How long they had owned it. The notified date clusters at 2016 for anyone who already held their shares, so length of ownership cannot be measured from this snapshot.
Everyone. Companies with voting shares on a UK regulated market are outside the regime, and a company owned through another company reports that company rather than a person. So this describes companies that had an identifiable individual owner to lose.
Age to the year. The register publishes month and year of birth only. Age is the year of cessation minus the year of birth, so any one figure may be out by a year.
Sums. Sector figures cover the 4,955,280 active companies carrying a readable SIC code, out of 5,171,600. Sector totals will not add up to the whole-register figures on the evidence page. That is not an error in either.
Self-declared and unaudited. Where a company has not kept its filings current, its record here is out of date.
Method, so you can repeat it
Two Companies House bulk data products, both free and open, at download.companieshouse.gov.uk. The basic company data snapshot dated 1 September 2026, 5,689,368 records. The persons with significant control snapshot dated 26 September 2026, 15,980,062 records. Both processed in full. No sampling.
Population. Active companies with a readable SIC code. Dissolved and liquidated companies are excluded, so this measures handovers at businesses still trading.
The event. A record of kind individual-person-with-significant-control carrying a ceased_on date, where the natures of control include ownership of shares or voting rights of 25 per cent or more.
What happened next is read from the company's current entry. A live corporate owner at 25 per cent or more is read as acquisition, then tested against the company's own name and the departing owner's surname and reclassified as a restructure where either matches. A surviving individual owner is read as a pass to another person. No qualifying owner is recorded as that, because it is genuinely ambiguous.
Size is the filed accounts category, because the thresholds determine which category a company may use. Substantial means full, group or medium.
If you disagree with a figure, the raw material is one download away and this page names every filter applied. Processing both files end to end takes about ten minutes.
