UK Roll-Up Niches: Fragmentation and Owner Age Across 97 Niches

Buy-and-build operators spend their first months on research, not deals. The founders of Arsipa, interviewed on the Buyers & Builders podcast, described narrowing about 60 candidate niches to a handful over 10 to 12 weeks. They then wrote to owners in batches of 300 to 400 letters, with interns researching each company, and completed two to four deals in 12 to 18 months.

This article does the first part of that work from the public register. We took every company our model currently rates PURSUE with £250k–£5m estimated EBITDA, 8,524 independent UK companies, and grouped them into 97 niches. For each niche we report how many companies there are, how old their owners are, how much of the niche other businesses already own, and how many new companies reached PURSUE in the last 90 days. No company is named: the unit throughout is the niche.

If you already have a niche in mind, test it now. Pick a sector, narrow it to one of its niches if you like, and see how many PURSUE companies fit a £250k–£5m buy box today. The tables below help you choose one.

How we built the roll-up niche table

• Companies. Every company our model rates PURSUE, our highest verdict, with £250k–£5m estimated EBITDA. It is the same set our search returns for "all sectors, £250k–£5m". PURSUE is driven by exit-timing signals over a business-quality floor, and every company in it has been through our target check.
• Niches. A niche is our activity classification, which is narrower than a sector. Plumbing & Heating and Electrical Installation, for example, both sit inside Construction & Trades.
• Owner age. The oldest individual on the register of people with significant control, the people who own the company, not the directors who run it.
• Owned by another business. The share of companies in the niche with a company among their registered owners, other than a holding company owned by the people who run it. That includes a parent owned by different people, a parent that is itself owned by a company, and a parent we cannot trace on the UK register.
• New in the last 90 days. Companies that moved into PURSUE after new Companies House information arrived: a new set of accounts, or a change of officer, owner or charge.
• Small numbers. We list only niches with at least 20 companies, and show any figure covering fewer than 10 companies as "<10".

Agriculture holds 322 of the 8,524 companies. We count it in the total but do not rank it, because farming is not a typical search fund or buy-and-build target.

The full table: 97 UK roll-up niches

Fragmented niches: where other businesses own the fewest companies

A roll-up needs a fragmented niche: many independent owners and few other businesses already buying. The five least consolidated niches we rank are Landscaping & Grounds Maintenance (5.5%), Motor Vehicle Dealers (7.6%), Funeral Services (7.8%), Scaffolding (9.0%) and Building Materials & Aggregates (9.2%).

Many owners hold their company through a holding company of their own, which puts a company on the register without anyone else owning it. We separate those out: a parent counts as the owner-managers' holding company when its owners share a surname with the company's own directors or owners. That covers founders and families, and also managers or searchers who bought the company and now run it. Everything else, including other trading groups, investor-owned buyout vehicles and parents registered abroad, counts as another business.

Sector pages for these niches: Facility & Field Services, Automotive, Healthcare, Construction & Trades, Manufacturing.

Owner age: where the owners are oldest

Owner age sets the timing of a buy-and-build programme. A niche full of owners in their forties can be right for a platform and still produce few sellers for a decade. Across all 8,524 companies, 57.9% have an oldest registered owner aged 60 or over. In Plastics & Rubber Products it is 84.7%.

New PURSUE companies in the last 90 days

A roll-up is not one list worked once. Companies reach the top band as new accounts are filed and ownership changes, and a programme that runs for years needs the new names as well as the first list. In the last 90 days, Retail (75), General Construction (67), Road Freight (65), Other Specialist Trades (57) and Software / SaaS (55) added the most.

Consolidated niches: where buy-and-build is already under way

At the other end, Energy / Utilities (34.4%), Packaging Manufacturing (31.8%), Plastics & Rubber Products (28.0%), Chemicals & Coatings (27.8%) and Education / Training (General) (27.5%) have the highest share of companies already owned by another business. A new buyer in these niches is competing with businesses that are already buying.

Who is already buying: active roll-up buyers by niche

The register of people with significant control also shows who is buying. Investment / Fund Management (110 buyers), Other Services (85 buyers) and Consultancy Services (65 buyers) have the most active roll-up buyers: companies that have bought at least three independently owned businesses in five years, and at least one in the niche in the last 24 months. In a niche with many active buyers, owners are already selling to consolidators, and a new platform will meet competition for deals.

Using the table to shortlist a niche

A niche worth shortlisting has three things at once: enough companies to build a platform from, a low share already owned by other businesses, and owners old enough that succession is close. The table lets you apply those three filters in an afternoon. It does not answer the questions only you can: margins, regulation, customer concentration, and whether you want to run that kind of business for ten years.

Once the niche is chosen, the work moves from the niche to the owners: the buy box at the top of this article counts the PURSUE companies in it today.

ExitRadar scores every company in the niche for exit timing and business quality, so most of the research and triage is done before you write the first letter. A Buy Box Licence names every PURSUE company inside your buy box for a year, and on any morning new ones appear we email them to you. For how searchers approach the same problem, see the UK search fund ecosystem and search fund deal sourcing. For deal flow across every trade, see our State of UK buy-and-build report.

Method

Figures were measured on 1 November 2026 from Companies House data held by ExitRadar. EBITDA figures are estimates: where a company files a full profit and loss account we use the filed figure, reduced for identifiable one-off gains, and where it does not we estimate EBITDA from the rest of its accounts. The consolidation measure uses every active company in the niche with £250k–£5m estimated EBITDA, not only PURSUE companies, because the PURSUE list we publish leaves out companies already owned by another company. PURSUE is our model's verdict on a company, not a forecast that it will sell.

For how a buyer gets to this stage, from search fund or holdco to platform, see how UK acquisition vehicles work.