Companies are ranked by compound annual growth of revenue over two years. To be included, companies must be registered in the UK – however, their ultimate holding company may be offshore. We have no requirement on headcount, but companies must have at least £5m in latest sales and minimum base year sales of £100,000. We accept quoted companies on UK and non-UK stock exchanges.

All data was collected from Companies House using the MarketIQ data platform on 4 February 2022. We did not take into account any filings that were made to Companies House after 1 February 2022, with the sole exception of Octopus Energy.

The majority of companies on the list have at least three years of full accounts filed on Companies House. The exception to this is where they have filed two years of accounts on Companies House, in which the sales figures for the third year are quoted. These exceptions came from other sources of information and were not included in the data collected using MarketIQ. They were then analysed to ensure they met our criteria.

Where companies’ financial periods are not equal to 52 weeks, we have made efforts to annualise these figures when calculating their CAGR for the sake of fairness in the rankings. Companies where sales figures were annualised are as follows: Tropic Skincare, Improbable, Tide, Privitar and Glencar Construction. Please note the figures quoted on the table are not annualised. When companies have filed accounts that are not in Pound Sterling, we have converted using historic exchange rates from the end of their specific financial period.

All data was subject to checks of the original Companies House accounts. We then requested that each company confirm that the figures we have for them are correct. In the case where a company did not respond to this request, we have made the assumption that the Companies House data is correct and published it as such. We removed companies that expressed a wish to be excluded from the list.

The resulting list of companies was run through additional exclusion criteria. We removed: professional services (solicitors, underwriters, recruiters) firms and LLPs; property developers and companies that trade in electricity (excluding energy providers); investment and private equity funds; joint ventures; publicly-owned and nonprofit organisations; CICs, housing associations and university-related property companies; foreign owned businesses; and companies that don’t file accounts on behalf of their whole structure.

Some exceptions to the criteria were made. The compiler’s decision is final, and no correspondence will be entered into. While all due care was taken to check financial and other data at Companies House and elsewhere, there may be omissions or errors; we welcome any feedback and/or corrections.