By Ian Gargett, MD of Rapport Digital
Walk down almost any UK high street and you will find one. A brass plate by a side door. A first-floor office above a café. A converted townhouse with a car park round the back. The local accountant is one of the most familiar tenants in British property.
But there are far fewer of them than there used to be.
Analysis of ONS business register data shows the UK now has 39,975 accountancy firms, down from a peak of 43,720 in 2019. That is 3,745 firms gone in six years. Almost one in every 11.
And that is no blip. Since 2019, the count has fallen or stalled every single year, with 2,260 firms disappearing in 2022 and 2023 alone.
As an accountant, I think small office landlords should pay close attention. The accountancy sector shows why a lot of small office space is not going to fill up again.
More work, fewer firms
Here is the strange part. Demand for accountants has not gone anywhere.
The total number of UK businesses holds broadly steady over the same six years. In 2019, there were 62 local businesses for every accountancy firm. Today there are 68. A regional breakdown shows the same rise in 11 of the UK’s 12 regions.
London makes the point best. The capital lost 1,855 accountancy firms, one in six of the total, while its business population actually grew 3.1%.
The profession is also short of people. In a survey of 500 accountancy firms across the UK, US, Canada and Australia, 73% said they were turning away potential clients because they did not have the staff.
So the work is there. The clients are there. The firms are not.
Why are firms disappearing?
Some were bought. The ONS counts whole firms, not individual offices, so when a larger group buys a local practice, that practice drops out of the figures. Crowe reports that as many as 20 of the UK’s top 60 accountancy firms are now backed by private equity.
Others closed as partners retired with nobody to hand over to.
And the firms that remain no longer need much space to grow. Cloud software, AI tools and remote working mean the work can be done almost anywhere. The Institute of Financial Accountants points to rising high street rents, utility costs and cloud software as the forces pushing practices out of their offices, with some going fully remote.
I see this first hand. Through Rapport Digital, I work with accountancy firms right across the UK, and the pattern is clear. More work, fewer firms, less space.
Will they come back to the office?
Landlords have spent six years waiting for staff to return to the office. For accountancy, that argument does not work.
Return to office is about people. This is about tenants. A firm can call its staff back to its office. Nobody can call back a firm that has been bought out or closed. When a group absorbs four local practices, its staff return to one hub, not four high street suites.
The numbers back this up. Remit Consulting recorded UK office occupancy of 44.1% this year, its highest since the pandemic. Yet in central London, deals under 10,000 sq ft ran 19% below their ten-year average in the first quarter of 2026. People are going back to offices. But small office demand is not following. Those brass plates by the side door are not coming back. The firms behind them have gone.
What should landlords do?
Accountancy is unlikely to be alone. Solicitors, surveyors, financial advisers and independent agencies share the same profile: small, office-based firms whose work increasingly happens on a laptop. If a profession with more work than it can handle is still losing firms, landlords cannot wait for demand to fill their space again.
That leaves two options. The first is to offer the space small firms still want. In the same Savills data, over 80% of central London deals under 5,000 sq ft were for fitted space, ready to use from day one. The second is a change of use. In the decade to 2024, almost 96,000 homes in England were created by converting offices under permitted development rights, according to the Local Government Association.
Either way, the time to plan is now, not after the accountancy firm in your building hands back the keys.
Ian Gargett is the MD of Rapport Digital, a marketing agency that works exclusively with accountancy firms.
