How many of them are matched to Companies House?

10,870 of the 21,012 SRA-regulated firms (51.7%) are matched to a live Companies House company record, which lets us add company type and incorporation date. Most law firms are LLPs or limited companies; the unmatched remainder are largely sole practitioners and traditional partnerships, which are not separate companies at Companies House.

Where does this data come from?

The headline count is the Solicitors Regulation Authority register of regulated organisations. We then match those firms to the Companies House Free Company Data Product (the bulk register of live UK companies, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0) purely to add colour — company type and incorporation date — where a match exists. Companies House is never counted into the firm total. The page reports aggregate statistics only and never identifies an individual firm.

How often is this updated?

The statistics are recomputed from our copy of the registers at most once every 24 hours. This snapshot was computed on 6 August 2026.

UK SRA-regulated law firm statistics

How many SRA-regulated law firms are there in the UK — and where?

Name: UK SRA-regulated law firms — company and location statistics
Creator: FirmGuard
License: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/

We take the Solicitors Regulation Authority register of regulated firms and add colour by matching it to Companies House: how many are limited companies or LLPs, how old they are, and where they are. 21,012 SRA-regulated firms, aggregate counts only — no firm is named.

Statistics computed 6 August 2026 · headline source: Solicitors Regulation Authority register · colour: Companies House (OGL v3.0) · raw JSON · methodology

21,012

UK law firms on the SRA register of regulated organisations

51.7%

matched to a live Companies House record (10,870 firms)

1,928

towns across England & Wales with a regulated firm

10,870

firms with a Companies House incorporation date on file

Every firm here is SRA-regulated

All 21,012 firms on this page are on the Solicitors Regulation Authority's register of regulated organisations — the firms the SRA supervises for anti-money-laundering purposes. We match them to Companies House purely to add colour: 10,870 (51.7%) resolve to a live Companies House company record, which is where the company-type and company-age tables below come from. Companies House is never added into the firm count. These are register facts about the sector, not a judgement about any firm.

Company type

Of the 10,870 firms matched to a live Companies House record, by registered company type. The Companies House bulk file carries live companies only, so this describes the matched subset.

Companies House company type of matched firms
Company type	Firms	% of matched
Private Limited Company	6,505	60.3%
Limited Liability Partnership	1,952	18.1%
Private limited company	1,415	13.1%
Public Limited Company	333	3.1%
PRI/LTD BY GUAR/NSC (Private, limited by guarantee, no share capital)	163	1.5%
PRI/LBG/NSC (Private, Limited by guarantee, no share capital, use of 'Limited' exemption)	156	1.4%
Other company type	86	0.8%
Overseas Entity	67	0.6%
Registered Society	66	0.6%
Royal Charter Company	46	0.4%

How old are the companies?

Company age at snapshot for the 10,870 firms with a Companies House incorporation date.

Company age (Companies House incorporation date; 10,870 matched firms)
Company age	Firms	% of matched
Under 2 years	269	2.5%
2–5 years	673	6.2%
5–10 years	1,595	14.7%
10–25 years	5,613	51.6%
Over 25 years	2,720	25.0%

Where are they?

By the registered post town on each firm's record.

Top 20 towns by firm count (registered post town)
#	Town	Firms	% of dataset
1	London	6,374	30.3%
2	Manchester	399	1.9%
3	Birmingham	324	1.5%
4	Leeds	217	1.0%
5	Bristol	208	1.0%
6	Dubai	178	0.8%
7	Liverpool	171	0.8%
8	Nottingham	163	0.8%
9	Reading	139	0.7%
10	Newcastle Upon Tyne	120	0.6%
11	Cardiff	115	0.5%
12	Sheffield	114	0.5%
13	Singapore	113	0.5%
14	Cambridge	104	0.5%
15	Leicester	103	0.5%
16	New York	85	0.4%
17	Milton Keynes	84	0.4%
18	Abu Dhabi	76	0.4%
19	Coventry	71	0.3%
20	Oxford	71	0.3%

Run a law firm? See what FirmGuard does for AML compliance.

FirmGuard is client due-diligence and anti-money-laundering software for small UK firms — identity verification (document plus biometric face match), sanctions and PEP screening against daily-refreshed lists, ongoing monitoring, and a dated audit pack per client that stands up to an SRA visit.

Start free → Compliance software, not legal advice. Is a figure here about your firm wrong? Email hello@firmguard.uk and we'll check it against the source registers within one working day.

Frequently asked questions

How many SRA-regulated law firms are there in the UK?: Our dataset holds 21,012 firms regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, drawn from the SRA's public register of regulated organisations. These are the firms supervised by the SRA for anti-money-laundering purposes.
How many of them are matched to Companies House?: 10,870 of the 21,012 SRA-regulated firms (51.7%) are matched to a live Companies House company record, which lets us add company type and incorporation date. Most law firms are LLPs or limited companies; the unmatched remainder are largely sole practitioners and traditional partnerships, which are not separate companies at Companies House.
Where does this data come from?: The headline count is the Solicitors Regulation Authority register of regulated organisations. We then match those firms to the Companies House Free Company Data Product (the bulk register of live UK companies, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0) purely to add colour — company type and incorporation date — where a match exists. Companies House is never counted into the firm total. The page reports aggregate statistics only and never identifies an individual firm.
How often is this updated?: The statistics are recomputed from our copy of the registers at most once every 24 hours. This snapshot was computed on 6 August 2026.
What is FirmGuard?: FirmGuard is client due-diligence and anti-money-laundering compliance software for small UK law firms — identity verification (document plus biometric face match), sanctions and PEP screening against daily-refreshed lists, ongoing monitoring, and a dated audit pack per client. It is compliance software, not legal advice.

Methodology & sources

Headline = the SRA register only. The 21,012 figure is firms on the Solicitors Regulation Authority register of regulated organisations — the firms the SRA supervises for anti-money-laundering purposes. It counts authorised bodies as the SRA lists them; a firm that runs several separately-authorised offices can appear once per authorisation. We deliberately do not add Companies House legal-sector companies into this total — those are a different, largely separate population, and summing the two overstates the number of firms.

Companies House is colour, not count. We match the SRA firms to the Companies House Free Company Data Product (the bulk file of live UK companies) only to add company type and incorporation date where a match exists. 10,870 of 21,012 firms matched (51.7%). Unmatched firms are largely partnerships and sole practitioners (not separate companies) plus name/postcode mismatches, so the company-type and age tables describe the matched subset — every table states its denominator. The bulk file carries live companies only, so every matched firm is in an Active company state.

De-duplication. Where the same SRA firm appears more than once we merge duplicates into one canonical record and count the 21,012 canonical SRA firms only.

Freshness. Statistics are recomputed at most every 24 hours; this snapshot was computed 6 August 2026. The free JSON API serves the identical snapshot for citation and reuse.

What this page is not. It is not a per-firm lookup, it names no firm, and it makes no claim that any firm is or is not compliant. Regulatory decisions are the SRA's alone.