The Agency by Agency Atlas 2026 Executive summary

Active UK agencies

24,747

Total agency workforce

194,311

Total agency Turnover

£32.6bn

These figures make a compelling case for the sector’s strategic importance, yet as the chapters of The Atlas demonstrate, the sector’s headline strength conceals a picture of profound internal complexity, of divergence between where agencies are concentrated and where growth is happening, between where investment flows and where opportunity lies, and between how the sector appears and how it actually functions.

Key findings from The Agency by Agency Atlas 2026

• The sector is growing, but most agencies are standing still.
  The average growth rate across all agencies we have mapped is 3.5%, but seven in ten agencies sit in the stable band, neither shrinking significantly nor growing rapidly. 
• New agency formation has been falling since its 2019 peak.
  Our data shows a sustained drop-off in new agencies being founded, through the pandemic, economic disruption and the acceleration of AI. With more than half of all agencies now over ten years old, the sector is increasingly mature, but with fewer new entrants to renew it. 
• Older agencies dominate the sector’s economics.
  Agencies operating for sixteen years or more represent just 30.1% of active businesses, yet account for 61.4% of total sector turnover, 51.6% of the workforce and 78.5% of all investment funding received. 
• Six in ten agencies have just one or two employees.
  The sector is, by number, overwhelmingly a landscape of nano-businesses. On the flipside, agencies with 251 or more employees, while making up just 0.6% of the total, are responsible for nearly a half of total turnover and about a third of the sector workforce. The sector effectively contains two largely separate economies operating under the same label. 
• The common specialisms are not necessarily the fastest-growing ones.
  Website and UX/UI Design is the most common specialism, accounting for a third of all agencies. But none of the five fastest-growing specialisms – Influencer (11.6%), Amazon and Marketplace (11.4%), Data and Analytics (10.6%), Social Purpose and Sustainability (9.2%) and Digital and AI Transformation (7.6%) – appear in the top five by agency count.
• London still dominates.
  The capital accounts for about a third of agencies, half the workforce and two thirds of turnover. Yet other measures bring the regions to the fore. The South West leads on GVA per head and the North East on average growth. 
• The fastest-growing agency clusters are not the ones you might expect.
  Among the fifteen largest agency cities, the highest average growth rates belong to Manchester (5.5%), Sheffield (5.3%), Leicester (5.2%) and Newcastle upon Tyne (5.1%). Oxford leads all fifteen clusters on GVA per head at £114,051.
• Women are founding agencies but not sustaining leadership in them.
  One in five agencies (21.0%) was founded primarily by women. But the proportion of agencies currently led by women is lower still at 19.7%, suggesting women are leaving or being outnumbered within leadership as agencies mature. 
• Women-led agencies are underrepresented in innovation funding to a striking degree.
  Women-led agencies account for 19.7% of active agencies but receive just 2.2% of all Innovate UK funding flowing to the sector. This disparity warrants serious attention from policymakers designing innovation support mechanisms.
• Holding companies account for 0.6% of agencies but 23.5% of turnover.
  The six major global holding companies represent a tiny fraction of the sector by number, yet employ 15.2% of its workforce and generate nearly a quarter of its revenue. 
• High-growth specialisms are attracting minimal investment.
  Influencer, Social Purpose and Sustainability, and Amazon and Marketplace agencies are among the fastest-growing in the sector, yet receive near-zero recorded investment. Whether this reflects a genuine information gap in the investment community or structural barriers to capital for smaller, newer specialisms, or even if the level of demand for these services means they are able to grow without needing investment, is an important question for the sector.
• The productivity data consistently challenges the assumptions the turnover data creates.
  Across almost every lens the Atlas applies, from age, size and region, to gender and specialism, GVA per head and turnover per head tell measurably different stories. Smaller agencies, younger agencies, women-led agencies and agencies outside London all appear to underperform on turnover measures but perform far more comparably on value added.

Mapping the UK agency sector

The Agency by Agency Atlas 2026 is based on our comprehensive mapping of the UK agency sector across 29 different specialisms. We map active agencies in partnership with The Data City, whose machine-learning platform identifies and categorises agencies by matching company websites with Companies House registrations, adjusting for dormant companies and those in liquidation or administration. An agency can appear in more than one specialism list depending on the services it offers. 

Once we have built and verified our list of agencies we combine our mapping with data from the world’s most trusted data providers, including The Data City, Companies House, CreditSafe, Dealroom, Lightcast, Innovate UK and more. For more on our mapping of the sector and individual data points, please take a look at our FAQs page.