Small Business Survey Scotland: 2024-2025

Introduction

This report sets out selected findings from the Longitudinal Small Business Survey (LSBS) 2024 for Scotland. It focusses on small and medium-sized enterprises (i.e. with fewer than 250 employees) with at least one employee (SME employers). It outlines the key characteristics of SME employers in Scotland and provides an overview of their responses on a range of themes including innovation, fair work and access to finance. In addition, the report provides an insight into business performance and outlook. Please note that headline findings for Scotland were included in the Department of Business and Trade (DBT) publication for the UK in September. This publication contains more detailed findings for Scotland. The time gap is due to the later availability of the more detailed data for Scotland, as well as the need to then process the raw data and quality assure the resultant tables.

According to Businesses in Scotland: 2025 – as of March 2025 – there were an estimated 381,855 SMEs operating in Scotland, of which those with employees represented around 28 per cent (105,470 enterprises). In the Scottish private sector, SMEs with employees accounted for 41 per cent of employment and 37 per cent of turnover (close to the respective 42 per cent and 37 per cent from March 2024).

An official statistics publication for Scotland

These statistics are official statistics. Official statistics are statistics that are produced by crown bodies, those acting on behalf of crown bodies, or those specified in statutory orders, as defined in the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007.

Scottish Government statistics are regulated by the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR). OSR sets the standards of trustworthiness, quality and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics that all producers of official statistics should adhere to.