2026 Financial Stability Report: specialised design activities

What this report covers

This is the 2026 financial-stability snapshot for specialised design activities (SIC 74100 · “specialised design activities”). Every figure on this page is derived live from the UK iXBRL filing population — there are roughly 156 active companies in this SIC, and we re-aggregate the medians, peer-set distributions and stability flags every business day at 04:00 GMT.

How the headline numbers are computed

• Average profit margin — operating profit / turnover, averaged across the SIC peer set with the top and bottom 1% trimmed to suppress outliers.
• Median staff cost — staff costs / average headcount, taken at the filing-level then ranked to the median of the active population.
• Median turnover — the ranked median of the latest-filing turnover for every active entity in this SIC. Holdco vehicles and dormant companies are excluded.
• Risk grade — an aggregate of the 41 stability checks we run on every filing in the SIC. A is “stable population, no concentration risks”. F is “broad distress signals, multiple concentration risks”.

Where this differs from Companies House aggregates

Companies House publishes filings — not statistics. The bureaus that do publish statistics re-license curated extracts on a quarterly cycle, and typically throw away the underlying iXBRL tags. We keep the tags and recompute the population every business day. The numbers above will shift week-on-week as new filings land and old ones drop out of the trailing-twelve-month window.