What the 2026 SIC Revision Changes for UK Publishing
If you read my piece last year on sizing and plotting the UK publishing industry based on Companies House data, there’s an interesting coda today with the publication of the Office for National Statistics’ updated Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes for 2026. If you’re not familiar with what SIC codes are, you’ve probably given up reading by now—but the short version is that SIC codes are short numbers that describe what business activities companies engage in. Firms choose one or more SIC codes when they register with Companies House.
My research last year was based on the then-current 2007 revision of the SIC codes, under which the focal categories were 58110 - Book publishing and 58141 - Publishing of learned journals. As I noted at the time, these codes are self-declared by companies and not always accurate, but they are the best starting point for analysis.
What’s changed for publishers in the 2026 revision? 58110 - Book publishing now has two subcategories, 58111 - Consumer book publishing and 58112 - Education and academic book publishing. However, the change notes make clear that activities of independent authors don’t sit here, but in 90111 - Literary creation activities. Journals publishing has moved from its own category to the new code 58131 - Publishing of learned journals, sitting under 58130 - Publishing of journals and periodicals, and alongside 58132 - Publishing of consumer, business and professional journals and periodicals.
It will take some time to be fully reflected in the data. The 2026 revision breaks comparability with earlier datasets based on SIC 2007, meaning any time-series analysis of the UK publishing sector will need to be restated or carefully mapped across the old and new codes. The benefit, however, is a cleaner separation between consumer and academic publishing, which should allow for more precise sizing of those segments going forward—something that has historically been difficult using Companies House data alone. It will also be interesting to see what overlap exists between 58111 - Consumer book publishing and 90111 - Literary creation activities, as that might give some sense of the number of independent authors crossing over into what the IBPA in America calls the author-publisher segment. I’m excited to see what analysis is going to be possible in time.