ACRA publishes free monthly statistics on how many businesses were formed, how many ceased, and how many are live on Singapore’s register. They sit on ACRA’s business registry statistics page as downloadable spreadsheets covering the current year and the previous three, updated monthly, broken down by entity type and by industry.
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That is the whole product, and it is better than most people assume. Three numbers a month, consistently defined, going back years, with an industry cut. You can answer real questions with it.
You can also embarrass yourself with it, because the numbers do not mean what a headline writer would like them to mean. A formation is not a new business. A cessation is not a failure. Here is how to use the data honestly.
What ACRA publishes, precisely
Three series, monthly, plus a summary table on the page itself.
| Series | What it counts | Breakdowns available |
|---|---|---|
| Formation of business entities | New entities registered with ACRA in the month | By entity type and by industry |
| Cessation of business entities | Entities that ceased registration in the month | By entity type and by industry |
| Live business entity count | Entities active on the register at the month end | By entity type |
Each is a downloadable spreadsheet on ACRA’s business registry statistics page, covering the current year and the preceding three. The page itself also carries a simple current-year table so you can see the headline movement without opening a file.
The register covers six entity types: companies (including foreign companies), sole proprietorships and partnerships, limited partnerships, limited liability partnerships, public accounting firms, and variable capital companies. The statistics are aggregates across all six unless you use the entity-type breakdown.
How often it updates, and what “as at” means
Monthly. Each release is stamped with a data-as-at date, and the file names carry that date too. A release published at the start of a month reflects the register as at that point, which means the most recent complete month is the most recent month you can analyse.
Get into the habit of recording the as-at date alongside any figure you extract. If you quote a live entity count in a board paper and someone reruns it three months later, the number will have moved and you will want to be able to show which vintage you used. To anchor the scale: ACRA’s business registry statistics page, as published on 1 September 2026, showed a total business entity count of 636,822 at the end of August 2026.
Where to go when ACRA’s three years are not enough
ACRA keeps a rolling four-year window. If you need a longer run, or interactive charts, the same series are carried by the Department of Statistics in SingStat TableBuilder, with formation and cessation available by entity type, by industry and by detailed industry.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. “By industry” gives you broad sectors. “By detailed industry” goes down to a granularity that will actually tell you whether your niche is growing, not whether “Professional, Scientific and Technical Activities” is growing. If you are doing serious market work, use the detailed cut.
SingStat is also where you go for anything requiring a decade-long view: pandemic-era comparisons, structural shifts in entity type, or the long decline or growth of a sector.
What the numbers honestly tell you, and what they do not
This is the part that separates a useful analysis from a misleading one.
A formation is a registration, not a business. People register entities for holding structures, for special purpose vehicles, to reserve a brand, for a fund, or because their bank asked them to. A month with high formations tells you registration activity is high. It does not tell you that employment, revenue or genuine new enterprise is high.
A cessation is not a failure. Cessations include voluntary closures of dormant shells, completed strike-offs, entities wound down after a group reorganisation, and businesses that simply finished. They also include ACRA’s own enforcement activity. When the Registrar runs a concerted exercise to clear defunct companies off the register, the cessation line jumps, and that jump is administrative housekeeping rather than economic distress. ACRA has flagged exactly this kind of distortion in its own 2026 figures, noting that an elevated company cessation count in March 2026 reflected intensified striking-off of defunct companies rather than a change in business conditions.
That single point should change how you read any cessation chart. Always check whether a spike has a footnote attached to it.
The live count is a stock, not a flow. Live entities at month end will not equal last month’s live count plus formations minus cessations, because restorations, conversions and timing differences all move the number. Do not try to reconcile the three series arithmetically and then conclude the data is wrong.
There is no revenue, headcount or survival data. The registry knows who is registered. It does not know who is trading. An entity can sit on the live count for a decade without ever issuing an invoice, which is precisely why dormant companies still have filing obligations. If that is your situation, our note on the ACRA alerts companies miss covers the deadlines that keep applying to entities that are doing nothing.
Six things a business owner or adviser can actually do with this
- Size your addressable market. Take the live count, apply the industry cut from SingStat’s detailed series, and you have the population of registered entities in your sector rather than a guess. Accurate to the extent that entities are correctly classified, which brings us to point two.
- Sanity-check your own SSIC classification. If your sector’s counts look implausible, the cause is often classification rather than reality. Businesses routinely register under a code that no longer describes what they do. Our guide to choosing your SSIC code explains how to fix that, and the recent code-set change is covered in the SSIC 2025 migration.
- Time a hiring or expansion decision. A sustained rise in formations in your sector usually precedes a rise in demand for services sold to that sector. Accountants, corporate secretaries, insurers and commercial landlords can all read this series as a leading indicator of their own pipeline.
- Support a grant or investment application. Applications that assert market growth are stronger when the assertion is sourced to a government series with a stated as-at date. Use the SingStat table reference so a reviewer can reproduce your figure.
- Benchmark entity-type choice. If you are advising on structure, the entity-type breakdown tells you what comparable businesses actually choose. It is not determinative, but it is a useful reality check against a structure that looks clever on paper.
- Spot a regulatory shift before it reaches you. A sharp move in a single entity type often reflects a rule change rather than market behaviour. Noticing the move is a prompt to go and find out what changed.
What goes wrong in practice
Quoting a figure without its vintage. The single most common error. A registry statistic is only meaningful with its as-at date attached. Write the date into the sentence, not the footnote.
Comparing months without adjusting for length and seasonality. February is short. December and the Lunar New Year period are quiet. Year-on-year comparisons of the same month are far safer than month-on-month.
Reading a cessation spike as an economic signal. Covered above, and worth repeating, because it is the error most likely to make it into a client memo.
Mixing ACRA’s series with a third-party count. Private data providers publish “number of companies in Singapore” figures on different definitions, often excluding sole proprietorships or including only active companies with recent filings. Pick one source, state it, and stay with it. The underlying registry framework is set by the Companies Act 1967 and the related registration statutes, and we cover the everyday end of that in the Companies Act 1967 deep-dive FAQ.
Frequently asked questions
How often does ACRA update its business registry statistics?
Monthly. Each release carries a data-as-at date and covers the current year plus the previous three. If you need a longer history than four years, the same formation and cessation series are available through the Department of Statistics TableBuilder portal, which also offers interactive charts.
Are the statistics free to download?
Yes. The spreadsheets are published on ACRA’s website at no cost and require no login or account. The SingStat TableBuilder tables are likewise free. Neither source charges for access, and neither requires you to state a purpose.
Do the statistics tell me how many businesses failed?
No. Cessation counts include voluntary closures, completed strike-offs, group reorganisations and ACRA’s own removal of defunct entities from the register. There is no distinction between an insolvency and a tidy voluntary wind-up, so a cessation figure cannot be read as a failure rate.
Can I get statistics for one specific industry?
Yes, by industry and by detailed industry, through the SingStat TableBuilder tables for formation and cessation. ACRA’s own downloadable files carry an industry breakdown too. Accuracy depends on entities being correctly classified under SSIC, which is not always the case.
Does the live entity count include dormant companies?
Yes. The count reflects entities that remain on the register, whether or not they are trading. A dormant company is still live for registry purposes and still carries filing obligations, so the live count overstates the number of businesses actually operating.
Using the numbers without overclaiming
The registry statistics are a clean, free, consistently defined series, and they answer a narrow set of questions extremely well. The discipline is in knowing which questions those are: how many entities exist, in what form, in which sector, and how that is moving. Not how the economy is doing.
Raffles Corporate Services works with these numbers regularly, usually when a client is sizing a market, preparing a grant application or trying to understand whether a structure is common or unusual. If you are building a case that rests on a registry figure, it is worth ten minutes of a second pair of eyes before it goes into a board pack.
You can reach us through Raffles Corporate Services, or read more on Singapore corporate secretarial practice at Singapore Secretary Services.
The Editorial Team, Raffles Corporate Services
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