How this census counts

There is no such thing as “the number of businesses” without a base. Every figure on the census is counted over one of three, and says which.

Everything active

3,681

Every organisation with a live trading or public presence in the Bailiwick that we have verified: businesses, charities, clubs, churches, public bodies. A company registration on its own does not qualify; a market stall with customers does.

With a primary sector

3,415

Those we have classified into one of the sixteen sectors. Sector counts add up to this number, not to the one above — the difference is organisations still awaiting classification, and the census says so beside the chart.

With the attribute on record

varies

A distribution of founding years describes the organisations that publish a founding year, not the island. That base is printed under every chart, and it is what the coverage figures below measure.

One consequence worth knowing before you quote anything: an organisation tagged in two sectors is counted in both wherever the census says “works in”. Those charts add up to more than the island does, on purpose, and they never say “is in”. The cross-sector chart is the one built on that basis.

Coverage is the share of the population that has the attribute on record. It decides what a figure may be used for — and the renderer enforces it, so a thin number cannot be promoted into a headline by choosing a different chart.

“Complete by construction” means every organisation necessarily has an answer: it is on one island or another, it either publishes a website or it does not. Those figures need no coverage test because there is nothing to be missing.

Live coverage per attribute, from the same aggregates the charts read. Follow a row to the section it governs.

The census is a verified subset of the island, and it grows every week. So a count here is the number we can stand behind, not the number that exists. The copy is written to carry that: organisations are “counted”, “on record”, “verified” — never “Guernsey has”. Superlatives are qualified the same way: the oldest on record, the only one we have found.

If you are writing a sentence from a figure here, that qualifier should survive the edit. “3,681 organisations counted” is supportable; “Guernsey has 3,681 businesses” is not, and the difference is the whole point of the page.

Ratios between two counts from the same population are fine and appear throughout. “One in N” is used only where the ratio genuinely rounds to a whole number; otherwise the census prints a percentage rather than flattering the arithmetic.

The coverage panel states the estimated true trading population as a range — 4,877–5,990 — because it is an estimate and a point estimate would pretend otherwise. It comes from capture–recapture against Google's business listings for the Bailiwick, with every organisation that was itself added from those listings left out of the comparison so the two counts stay independent, measured on 3 September 2026. The central estimate is 5,415, which puts the census at about 68% of the island’s trading organisations; the range spans 61–76%.

The measurement only works while the two enumerations are independent, which is a real constraint rather than a formality: once a source has been used to add organisations to the census, that source can no longer be used to measure how much the census is missing. Each re-measurement therefore leaves out of the comparison every organisation that was itself added from the listing it is being compared against, re-matches every listing the census had not yet resolved, and treats the listings it still cannot verify as unknown rather than as either present or absent — which is where the width of the range comes from. It is re-run rather than assumed. The bar on the coverage meter takes the conservative end of the range, so it can never overstate what has been counted.

The same comparison, sector by sector, gives a measured coverage for each sector’s count. These are the figures the sector pages state; they share the whole-island caveat that organisations invisible to both the census and the listing pull the estimate down, and they are published as percentages only — a sector population would be a point estimate without an interval, which the census does not print.

The sector league sets the 16 sectors side by side on the figures they all have: how many organisations are counted in each, how many run a website of their own, how many link a social account, what share of those websites sit on a .gg-family domain, how many have what they do resolved to the capability graph and how deep that goes, the median founding year of the ones that publish a date, how many publish opening hours, the parish each sector is most concentrated in, and how much of each sector the census has found. Every one of those cells is the figure that sector’s own chapter prints — the same query over the same population, computed once — so the table and the chapter can never disagree.

A rank counts citable cells only. A sector whose coverage on a column is merely indicative sits in the table wearing its badge but takes no place in that column’s order, and a superlative is never claimed over it: “the third-highest of 16” means third of sixteen cells that cleared the bar, and where fewer did the sentence says so (“of the 11 sectors where it can be counted”). Equal values are joint. A sector whose own cell is not citable gets no rank sentence at all, on the table or in its chapter.

The single-suppliers table lists the essential services Guernsey gets from one or two organisations. It is the one module on the census built on a published list rather than on a query alone, and this is the list. The services are fixed here; who supplies each is read from the record every hour, through the capability node or the niche named against it, for active organisations on Guernsey. A row is never dropped for having too many suppliers, and a service with nobody on record says so rather than disappearing. The heading counts the services with 2 suppliers or fewer.

Each row states why it has so few suppliers, because that is the finding: a States trading company, a contract let by the States, a licence from a public regulator. Those are public facts, which is what lets the module clear the citable bar on the register-anchor branch of the tier rule (§2) with fewer than thirty rows. The census records who the suppliers are; it takes no view on whether one is the right number.

1. Electricity supplyStates-ownedThe island's electricity utility is a States of Guernsey trading company. niche electricity-suppliers-and-distribution →
2. Water supply and wastewaterStates-ownedWater and wastewater are States of Guernsey trading services. niche water-supply-and-wastewater-services →
3. Scheduled bus servicesStates contractThe island's bus network is run under a contract let by the States of Guernsey. capability scheduled_bus →
4. Scheduled airlineStates-ownedThe island's own airline is owned by the States of Guernsey; a second carrier flies under its own licence. capability scheduled_airline →
5. Broadband and internet serviceLicensedTelecoms operators are licensed by the Guernsey Competition and Regulatory Authority. capability broadband_isp →
6. Fixed-line telephoneLicensedTelecoms operators are licensed by the Guernsey Competition and Regulatory Authority. capability fixed_line →
7. Cheese and dairy produceStates-ownedThe island's dairy is a States of Guernsey trading service; a second producer works alongside it. capability dairy_produce →
8. Acute hospital careStates-ownedThe island's acute hospital is run by the States of Guernsey. capability acute_hospital_care →

Left off the list on purpose: services whose probe would count the wrong thing. Postal services, because the capability node mixes couriers with post-office counters; mains gas, heating oil, ambulance, fire and policing, because their capability nodes have nobody on record yet — the table names those gaps from the taxonomy itself. Other islands are the mini-census’s business: Sark and Alderney have their own single suppliers, and one row for four islands would print “three electricity companies” for an island with one.

Four families of figure on the census have a known lean. Each carries its sentence beside the chart, where the number is.

• Founding years →

  Counts organisations still trading that publish a founding year; older firms are likelier to do so. Two biases at once — survivorship, because the ones that closed are not here, and reporting, because a founding date is a thing established firms advertise.

• Anything web-derived →

  Verified from published evidence; businesses without a web presence are under-represented. Sole traders and Facebook-only businesses are the ones this misses, and the miss is not evenly spread across trades.

• Capabilities →

  Capabilities as published by each organisation and resolved to the graph. A service nobody has written down anywhere is not in the graph, and one written down in a way that did not resolve to a known node is not either.

• Register comparisons →

  Register rows not yet matched to a trading presence are counted as unmatched, not as non-trading. An unmatched row is a job we have not done, not a business that does not exist.

Facts on the census are one of three kinds, and only two of them are published here.

Graph-verified

the default

Our own claims, each linked to the published source it came from and re-checked over time.

Register-anchored

cited

Counts reconciled against a public register or directory, cited to that register. These carry a reconciliation badge rather than a coverage percentage.

Third-party observed

not published

Facts observed on someone else's platform — ratings, listing status, map tags. These are used to measure how much the census is missing; they are not published as census figures.

People are aggregate-only on the census. It will tell you how many people hold roles at two or more organisations; it will not rank named individuals on a statistical page.

Counts are exact. Shares are whole percentages. Estimates are ranges, never a point. A median is only printed over a large enough sample; below that the census says “typically” and gives the range, or prints nothing. Per-head figures cite the resident-population source beside the figure, because a density is two numbers and only one of them is ours.

Coverage is partial and stated openly; a closure can lag reality by weeks. If something here is wrong, that is worth more to us than a polite silence — tell us and corrections ship continuously. Press enquiries: press@island.gg.

The figures are licensed CC BY 4.0 — credit “Island Graph” with a link. Both machine formats are on the data page, and every figure carries its denominator there too.

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