The Guernsey Business Census
How many businesses does Guernsey have? Nobody could answer that — the company register records legal entities, not who actually trades. This page counts the Bailiwick’s real economy: every business, charity and public body with a live trading presence, each verified against published evidence.
active businesses and organisations trading across the Bailiwick’s four inhabited islands today.
Coverage
#coverage ⧉How complete is this count?
Sampling against independent registers puts the Bailiwick’s true trading population at an estimated 5,000–6,000. This census has verified an estimated 50–60% of it so far, and grows every week — the coverage figure is re-measured, not assumed.
Every count on this page is therefore a floor, never a guess. Where a directory says “37+ plumbers”, a census tells you the number, the denominator, and what it hasn’t counted yet.
Numbers nobody had
#headlines ⧉What the island does
#sectors ⧉16 sectors, from building trades to trust companies
Property and the public square lead: nearly one organisation in three is either a building-and-home trade or a charity, club or public body. Finance — the sector Guernsey is known for — sits mid-table by headcount of firms.
Sector counts are by each organisation’s primary sector; 273 of the 3,001 await a primary classification. Every sector links to its full, named roll call.
Where it happens
#parishes ⧉Town dominates; Torteval fields 24
St Peter Port holds more organisations than the next three parishes combined. At the other end, the entire parish of Torteval — population ~1,000 — runs on 24 organisations.
Guernsey parishes only; Alderney, Sark and Herm are counted in the island split above. 336organisations don’t yet have a parish on record — the map fills in as verification proceeds.
How old it is
#age ⧉A millennium of founding dates — and a very young economy
The register spans from a parish church founded in 1030 to businesses opened this year. But the bulk is startlingly recent: half of everything trading today was founded after 2003.
Founding years are on record for 1,501 of 3,001 organisations; the distribution above describes those. “On-island since” is the year a business began trading here — a branch of an older mainland firm counts from its Guernsey arrival, not its parent’s founding.
The register is alive
#pulse ⧉The last 30 days
A census that was true in January is folklore by August. This one re-checks itself continuously — openings, closures, renames and new facts land as they’re found.
Use these numbers
#use ⧉Free to reuse, with attribution
Journalists, researchers and officials are welcome to these figures. Every section has a stable anchor, and every count traces to published evidence. License: CC BY 4.0 — credit “Island Graph” with a link.
Writing about this? Press enquiries → press@island.gg. Machine readers: this page carries schema.org Dataset markup.
Methodology, briefly
#method ⧉What counts
Anything with a live trading or public presence in the Bailiwick: businesses, charities, clubs, churches, public bodies. Presence, not paperwork — a company registration alone doesn’t qualify; a market stall with customers does.
How it’s verified
Every organisation is built from published evidence — its own site, regulators, sector bodies, local press — with each fact linked to its source and re-checked over time. 154,752 standing facts today.
What we get wrong
Coverage is partial and stated openly; closures can lag reality by weeks. Spot an error or a missing business? Tell us — corrections ship continuously.