On the 3rd of July, HMRC released its latest Employee Share Scheme (ESS) statistics for the tax year ending 2025, and we spent some time picking through the numbers. A few trends stood out.
A quick caveat before we dive in: the figures below cover the tax year ending 2025 and the three years before it. HMRC identified a data error affecting earlier years, so anything before the tax year ending 2022 has been withdrawn from this release.
Everything we discuss here sits within that four-year window, so just keep that in mind.
The number of companies running Enterprise Management Incentives (EMIs) has grown from 16,460 to 18,570 over the past three years, up 12.8%. Company Share Option Plans (CSOPs) have grown at almost exactly the same rate, from 1,240 to 1,390 companies, up 12.1%.
EMI alone now accounts for 90% of all companies running a tax-advantaged scheme in the UK.
Save As You Earn (SAYE) schemes and Share Incentive Plans (SIPs) tell a different story. These are the UK's two "all-employee" schemes, which must be offered to the whole workforce rather than a select group. Both are shrinking.
SAYE fell from 540 to 480 companies over the same period, down 11.1%. SIP fell from 860 to 800, down 7%.
One plausible reading is that UK companies, especially SMEs and scaleups, increasingly see equity as a deliberate tool for bringing in and keeping key people, rather than a blanket perk.
| ESS | 2021-22 | 2022-23 | 2023-24 | 2024-25 | 3-yr change |
| EMI | 16,460 | 17,780 | 18,220 | 18,570 | +12.8% |
| CSOP | 1,240 | 1,310 | 1,360 | 1,390 | +12.1% |
| CSOP & EMI | 120 | 140 | 180 | 200 | +66.7% |
| SAYE | 540 | 550 | 520 | 480 | -11.1% |
| SIP | 860 | 830 | 830 | 800 | -7.0% |
Source: Gov.UK
In March 2023, the Government doubled the CSOP option limit from £30,000 to £60,000, effective from 6 April 2023.
It also scrapped a rule called the "worth having" condition, which had made it hard for companies with more than one class of share to use CSOP at all, and multiple share classes are common once a business has taken on outside investment.
The average value per CSOP grant sat at £9,130 in the year before the reform. In the very year it landed, that jumped to £13,680, a near-50% increase in a single year. It's since settled to £11,080, still well above where it started.
Policy reform doesn't always show up this cleanly in the data. This time it did. CSOP was built to give companies that have outgrown EMI's limits a next step, and it looks like it's actually working as intended.
This is the less optimistic trend.
More companies than ever are granting EMI options; the number is up 16.6% over the past three years, which is excellent. Fantastic.
However, the number of employees actually receiving those grants has fallen over the same window, from 50,000 to 42,000, a 16% drop. Average value per employee has climbed 14.7%, from £12,150 to £13,930.
That suggests that EMI is increasingly being used to lock in a handful of key hires, leadership, and early engineers, rather than as something every employee gets a slice of.
Now, we’ve long believed that offering equity across a whole team tends to build more committed, more aligned businesses than concentrating it in a few hands. So a trend toward narrower participation, even as more companies adopt EMI, admittedly doesn’t spark joy.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons a business might choose to grant selectively. But it's a trend worth pointing out because how many companies offer EMI and how many people actually benefit from it are two separate things.
The number of companies operating both CSOP and EMI together has grown from 120 to 200 over the same period, a 66.7% increase. It's a small base, but it's growing faster than either scheme on its own.
This tracks with what we see from our own customers. Companies start with EMI, grow past its per employee or company-wide limits, and add CSOP alongside it. Increasingly, it's both.
One thing worth flagging: EMI itself became available to a much wider pool of companies from 6 April 2026, with the employee limit rising from 250 to 500 and the gross assets limit rising from £30 million to £120 million, which again is fantastic.
But as HMRC’s latest share scheme data predates that change, we won't see the first signs of its effect until HMRC publishes tax year ending 2027 figures (expected around mid-2028).
Side note: EMI and CSOP agreements can include PISCES as an exercise event. Worth keeping in mind if you’re considering ways to unlock liquidity for shareholders but don’t plan on going public anytime soon!
Put the four trends together and a picture starts to form. Discretionary schemes keep growing, all-employee schemes keep shrinking, and reform, when it happens, clearly doesn't take long to show up in the numbers. And EMI, for all its growth, is being granted more selectively.
If you're a founder, ops or finance lead thinking about how to structure your own scheme, it's useful context. EMI remains the obvious starting point for most SMEs, even more so now following its expansion. And even if you do exceed the new EMI limits, CSOPs are still a solid option.
If you're weighing up EMI, CSOP, or a combination of both for your own team, our equity specialists are happy to talk it through. Book a free consultation, and they'll help you figure out what fits.