The Department for Culture, Media and Sport counted 269,655 businesses in the UK’s creative industries in March 2025. According to its business demographics release for 2025, 77.8% of them had an annual turnover of less than £250,000, compared with 65.3% of all UK registered businesses. Measured by staff rather than money, 93.4% of the same businesses were in the micro band of nine or fewer employees, against 89.1% for the register as a whole. Worked through, that is roughly 252,000 creative businesses with fewer than ten employees and about 210,000 below the £250,000 turnover line. Both totals are approximate, because they are calculated from percentages given to one decimal place.
Figures on the cost of filming come from a narrower source with a different population. AdGreen, which joined the Advertising Association in 2020, published an annual review of the advert productions that agencies and production companies had logged in its carbon calculator during 2022. For the 448 projects that recorded shoot days, it gives a mean budget of £71,868.30 per shoot day. The two datasets describe different firms, so putting them side by side gives only a rough sense of scale. £250,000 is less than four shoot days at that 2022 mean, since four days come to £287,473.20.
One request that reaches firms of this size is a second version of a video that has already gone out. It might be the same clip of a staff member showing a product, with a winter look or for a different market. Through ai video to video, a clip the business filmed for the first job can be restyled with a different backdrop or light, or its recorded movement can be carried onto a still image the business owns. The footage and the still should be the firm’s own or licensed to it, and anyone who appears in either should have consented to this use.
What the DCMS Release Counts and Leaves Out
The figures are from DCMS Economic Estimates: Business Demographics 2025, published on 27 November 2025 as accredited official statistics and built from a March snapshot of the Inter-Departmental Business Register. When the release refers to UK businesses in general, it means those registered with HMRC for VAT and/or PAYE. A freelancer who is registered for neither is not part of these totals. The 93.4% micro share is therefore a share of registered businesses rather than of everyone who earns a living from creative work.
The creative industries are also a wide grouping. The main report gives them as a single total with no breakdown by type of work. It cannot say how many of the 269,655 make video or adverts. DCMS also notes that its sectors “are not mutually exclusive”. The cultural sector, where the micro share is even higher at 95.4%, overlaps with the creative industries and cannot simply be added to them.
The release counts business sites as well as businesses, a site being one of a business’s premises (the release’s own example is “a factory or a shop”). Creative businesses had 278,215 sites in March 2025. Of those sites, 33.9% were in London, against 18.8% of all UK registered business sites. The sector is far more concentrated in the capital than the economy as a whole.
The Fall in Business Numbers Since 2019
The number of creative businesses fell by 9.4% between March 2019 and March 2025. The release gives the percentage rather than the earlier count. Working back from 269,655 puts the March 2019 figure at roughly 298,000. Over the same six years the total of UK registered businesses ended 0.6% higher than it started, so the drop was not part of a general fall in registrations.
DCMS attaches a warning to exactly this kind of figure in the background section of the release, where it says that “the number of businesses is not the same as economic performance”. It adds that a fall in the count “does not necessarily mean that there has been a corresponding decrease in the sector’s economic output”. The example it gives is the creative industries, whose business count dropped over the period “whereas GVA over this period is estimated to have increased”. GVA, or gross value added, is the value of what a sector produces after the cost of its inputs. The release does not go into why the count fell.
The turnover bands in the opening paragraph carry a caveat of their own. Across the DCMS sectors as a group, the share of businesses below £250,000 has fallen since 2019 while the share above £1 million has risen. DCMS adds that turnover figures “have not been adjusted for inflation, which is likely to be a factor in these changes”. A firm whose takings have only kept pace with prices can therefore move up a band over six years without having grown in real terms.
What AdGreen’s 2022 Shoot-Day Figures Cover
The AdGreen calculator launched in September 2021. The 2022 review covers 515 motion and stills projects completed that year by 87 companies, using data exported on 30 January 2023. Each project has a brand assigned and a budget recorded. Of these, 75% both originated in the UK and had their budget in pounds, so this is mostly British advertising work.
Of the 515, 448 recorded shoot days, 1,099 days in total or a mean of 2.5 each. It is for these 448 that the review gives the mean budget of £71,868.30 per shoot day. The line printed beneath that figure on page 8 reads “Only 158 had budgets above £50,000 per shoot day”. That leaves 290 projects, or about 65% of the 448, at £50,000 a day or less. On page 19 the 158 larger projects are broken out on their own: they account for 394 of the 1,099 shoot days and have a mean budget per shoot day of £175,353.92. By subtraction the other 290 projects shared the remaining 705 shoot days, but the review does not publish their mean budget, and it cannot be worked out reliably from the means that are given.
The authors expected their figures to understate larger work, and say so on page 8. “Overall the 2022 data is skewed towards smaller projects, both in terms of material impact and also budget, meaning the averages are also skewed downwards.” Their explanation on the same page is that many larger productions were not yet being recorded in the tool, so £71,868.30 describes what was logged in 2022 rather than advertising production as a whole.
The small end of the dataset is the part nearest in scale to most businesses in the DCMS count. Among what the review calls “the smallest 289 projects” (grouped by measured footprint, not by budget), 209 recorded no shoot day, half a day or one day. Of the 289, 91 had a budget of £10,000 or less. Sixty-eight carried at least one of five tags that include adaptation/localisation and archive/stock, alongside CGI/VFX and two kinds of animation. Because a single tag was enough to be counted, the 68 does not show how many of those projects were new versions of existing material.
The Bottom Line
The DCMS figures above come from a March 2025 snapshot of the business register, so they should be quoted with that date. AdGreen called its 2022 review “only the first year of data”. It added that “as use of the tool increases, so too will the insights available”. That makes £71,868.30 a first reading from a tool that was still being taken up by the industry rather than a settled price for a day of filming.
