And nobody was counting. There was no measure of this until 7 September 2026, when one was invented. There has been no legal duty on a British company director to disclose their age since 2006. The Office for National Statistics does not collect it. ONS names its redundancy table “Redundancies by industry, age, sex and re-employment rates” and the current edition contains no re-employment figures at all.
Everything else in this record is someone else's published figure with the source attached. This is the exception, and it is marked as one. On 27 September 2026 I took the two files Companies House publishes free, the company register and the persons with significant control register, and counted the age of every person controlling an active British company. 5,241,049 controlling positions. No sampling. The method is below so anyone can repeat it in a few minutes, and disagree.
It answers, for owners, one of the things listed above as not here: how old the people running British companies are. Nobody had published the distribution. Now there is one.
Across every active British company, the median person in control is 47. 44.3 per cent are fifty or over, 20.7 per cent sixty or over. Among the 30,999 positions in companies filing medium, full or group accounts, the median is 60, four in five are fifty or over, more than half are sixty or over, and the single most common age is 58. 2,022,390 positions, 38.6 per cent, are held by people born between 1965 and 1980. Among the substantial companies it is 42.4 per cent.
By company size. As a company gets more substantial, the person controlling it gets older, and this holds in every filing category. The median age of the person in control is 48 across 1,851,337 positions in micro-entities and 62 across 11,481 positions in companies filing full accounts.
| Accounts filed | Positions | Median age | 50 and over | 60 and over |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Micro-entity | 1,851,337 | 48 | 46.8% | 21.5% |
| Unaudited abridged | 168,229 | 50 | 52.4% | 25.3% |
| Total exemption full | 1,342,098 | 52 | 57.0% | 29.1% |
| Audit-exempt subsidiary | 699 | 56 | 68.4% | 39.6% |
| Small | 11,103 | 60 | 80.7% | 52.6% |
| Group | 17,028 | 59 | 78.0% | 48.2% |
| Medium | 2,490 | 60 | 79.7% | 51.4% |
| Full | 11,481 | 62 | 82.5% | 56.8% |
| No accounts filed | 1,333,737 | 40 | 24.0% | 8.0% |
| Dormant | 502,084 | 49 | 49.4% | 25.2% |
By region. Re-run on 28 September 2026 from the same two files, this time the PSC snapshot of 27 September, with each company placed by the postcode district of its registered office. The re-run gave 5,235,837 positions against 5,241,049 the day before, and every headline figure above unchanged. The age of the person who controls the local firm varies by region. The age of the person who controls a substantial one does not.
| Registered office | Positions | Median age | 50 and over | 60 and over | Median, substantial | 50 and over, substantial |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| London | 1,395,436 | 45 | 37.7% | 16.4% | 60 | 79.3% |
| South East | 719,217 | 50 | 50.3% | 24.5% | 60 | 81.2% |
| North West | 531,454 | 47 | 42.9% | 19.6% | 59 | 78.3% |
| East of England | 517,282 | 48 | 46.2% | 22.1% | 60 | 78.8% |
| West Midlands | 420,310 | 47 | 43.5% | 20.1% | 60 | 79.6% |
| South West | 361,487 | 50 | 52.2% | 26.5% | 61 | 82.7% |
| Yorkshire and The Humber | 331,053 | 47 | 44.8% | 20.7% | 59 | 78.6% |
| East Midlands | 310,261 | 48 | 46.7% | 21.9% | 60 | 79.9% |
| Scotland | 280,544 | 48 | 46.7% | 22.3% | 60 | 81.0% |
| Wales | 155,895 | 48 | 46.8% | 23.1% | 60 | 79.6% |
| North East | 124,924 | 47 | 42.6% | 19.9% | 61 | 80.1% |
| Northern Ireland | 85,631 | 49 | 47.8% | 22.3% | 60 | 81.1% |
Every age. One bar per year of age in 2026, all active companies. Gold is born 1965 to 1980. The most common single age is 46.
What it does not show. The persons with significant control regime does not cover every company. Companies with voting shares admitted to trading on a UK regulated market are exempt from it, and a company owned through a corporate structure reports that corporate entity rather than an ultimate individual. Two thirds of the substantial companies in a sector sample taken during this work were controlled by a corporate entity rather than a person. So the substantial-company figures describe firms still controlled by an identifiable individual. They do not describe listed companies, private equity holdings, or the British subsidiaries of foreign parents. Quoted without that, the figure is wrong.
The gradient by company size is partly survivorship. Older companies are both larger and more likely to be controlled by someone who has been there a long time. The register is self-declared and not audited. One person can control several companies, so these are positions, not people; matching on name, birth month and year gives roughly 4,152,799 distinct people, and that is approximate because two people can share a name and a birth month. The register gives month and year of birth only, so age is 2026 minus birth year and any single figure may be out by a year. Born 1965 to 1980 is counted as aged 46 to 61.
Method. Basic company data snapshot dated 1 September 2026, 5,689,368 records, filtered to active companies, 5,171,600. Persons with significant control snapshot dated 26 September 2026, 15,980,062 records, filtered to kind individual-person-with-significant-control, no ceased date, 25 per cent or more of shares or voting rights: 5,242,337 live positions, of which 5,241,049 carry a usable date of birth and an age between 16 and 100. Both files processed in full on 27 September 2026. Companies House analysed the register for age once, in a blog post in January 2022, by sector and in three broad bands; I could find nothing publishing the distribution or the cut by company size.
Repeat it. Both files are at download.companieshouse.gov.uk, no account, no key, no payment. 470MB and 2.1GB compressed. Processing both end to end took under four minutes. Not done: no gender (it should not be attempted from names), and no trend, because the site holds only the current snapshot. I am keeping a copy from this year on.
The register that gave the first count also records when a person stops controlling a company, and those ceased entries stay in the file. There are 1,010,685 of them attached to companies still trading. On 28 September 2026 I counted them. This is the part that concerns substantial companies, the ones filing full, group or medium accounts, above the small-company threshold, the same definition as above.
It does not close one of the absences listed earlier. The nearest is what departing chief executives do next, which is about the person. This is about the company, and about owners rather than the employed. The person’s next step is still uncounted.
The count by sector, against your own age, is at When British owners let go.
What happened next. Read from each company’s current entry. The pattern reverses with size: across every active company seven in ten handovers pass to another person; at substantial companies the largest single outcome is a sale.
| Outcome | All active companies | Substantial | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bought by an unconnected company | 88,939 | 12% | 7,323 | 34.3% |
| Restructured under a holding company or the owner’s own vehicle | 57,631 | 8% | 5,618 | 26.3% |
| Passed to another individual | 502,644 | 70% | 5,102 | 23.9% |
| No owner of 25 per cent or more now recorded | 63,846 | 9% | 3,297 | 15.4% |
| Companies | 713,060 | 21,340 |
The correction that travels with it. 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 a holding company, not a buyer. Separating those takes acquisition from 61 per cent of substantial-company handovers to 34. Any count from this register that skips that test overstates how often British companies are sold. It is a test on words in names and it will misclassify at the margins in both directions.
Age when they let go. Substantial companies. Base 36,779 owners whose birth year the register carries.
| Age | Owners | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Under 45 | 6,197 | 16.8% |
| 45 to 54 | 9,538 | 25.9% |
| 55 to 64 | 10,465 | 28.5% |
| 65 and over | 10,579 | 28.8% |
Selling happens earlier than passing on.
| What happened | Median age | 55 and over | Owners |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bought by another company | 55 | 53% | 12,516 |
| Restructured | 56 | 55% | 9,857 |
| No owner recorded | 57 | 57% | 6,725 |
| Passed to another individual | 62 | 66% | 7,681 |
By sector. 45 sectors have at least 100 handovers at substantial companies. Data and information services owners let go at a median of 48. Insurance and pensions owners at 66. The full spread, with the number of handovers behind every figure, is on the instrument.
Substantial companies bought after the owner let go, by year. The peak is 2021. The two years after it fell and the count has not returned to that level. A cessation can be filed late, so recent years understate. 2026 is a part year and is left out.
| Year | Bought |
|---|---|
| 2017 | 557 |
| 2018 | 595 |
| 2019 | 662 |
| 2020 | 593 |
| 2021 | 916 |
| 2022 | 739 |
| 2023 | 762 |
| 2024 | 870 |
| 2025 | 824 |
What it does not show. The register records that control ended, not why. Sale, gift, dilution, retirement, illness and death file identically, and death cannot be separated out, so at the older end some of what looks like an exit is a bereavement. No price, terms or multiple are public for a private company. The regime began in 2016, so the earliest years are partly a backlog of first-time filings and there is no earlier baseline. Length of ownership cannot be measured, because the notified date clusters at 2016 for anyone who already held their shares. Companies with voting shares on a regulated market are outside the regime, and a company owned through another company reports that company rather than a person.
Method. Basic company data snapshot dated 1 September 2026, filtered to active companies with a readable SIC code, 4,955,280. Persons with significant control snapshot dated 26 September 2026. The event is a record of kind individual-person-with-significant-control carrying a ceased_on date, where the natures of control include 25 per cent or more of shares or voting rights. What happened next is read from the company’s current entry: a live corporate owner at 25 per cent or more is acquisition unless the name test above reclassifies it; a surviving individual owner is a pass to another person; nothing qualifying is recorded as that. Age is the year of cessation minus the year of birth, so any one figure may be out by a year. Sector figures will not sum to the whole-register figures above, because the sector population requires a SIC code.
Repeat it. Same two files as the first count, at download.companieshouse.gov.uk. Processing both end to end takes about ten minutes.
Two kinds of entry. Some are here to place you in time. They need a date and an accurate description and nothing else. The rest carry a claim, and a claim needs a primary source and, where one exists, a number.
Two different tests. For an entry after you started work: would a working life have gone differently depending on whether you were 25 or 45 when it happened? For an entry before you started: did it shape what you expected when you arrived? They are not the same question and the record does not pretend they are.
Where a claim comes from. Almost everything here with a number behind it has had its source opened and read, and the sentence quoted comes out of that source rather than out of a summary of it. A handful have no public link, and those say so when you click them.
The photographs are made. Every image on The Record and on Crazy Paving is generated, apart from the two of Magnus. They are there to put you back in the year. Nothing in this record rests on a photograph.