What this report covers
This is the 2026 financial-stability snapshot for Belfast. The active sample contains 26 filers averaging £14.7M of revenue at a 6.05% operating margin — the highest average revenue per firm in the regional directory and the strongest combination of scale and profitability outside London.
Twenty-six firms is a meaningful sample for a regional report — large enough to suppress the noise of any single low-margin or one-off filing, small enough that we can read the underlying iXBRL tag-level data filing-by-filing. The signal worth taking from the snapshot is structural: a relatively concentrated population of large, positive-margin firms exists in the Belfast active-filer base, and the sample mean sits comfortably above the regional pack outside London.
What stands out in the Belfast sample
For credit, vendor-risk and origination teams with Belfast exposure, the most informative observations from the daily Pulse feed are:
- Average revenue per firm is the highest in the directory. £14.7M average is materially above Manchester (£1.7M), Edinburgh (£5.3M) and Birmingham (£2.7M) — a meaningful difference even adjusted for sectoral mix.
- Operating margins clear the 5% line. A 6.05% average margin is not London-grade, but it is the only non-London region in the 2026 directory above the 5% threshold most credit models treat as a stability floor.
- Sample composition skews to larger filers. Belfast’s active-filer population is heavily weighted toward firms above the £10.2M turnover threshold, which both lifts the average revenue figure and tightens the margin distribution.