From March 2024 to April 2025 49,268 certificates were issued.
The highest number of Cyber Essentials certificates were issued in Q1 of 2025, with more than 10,000 distributed to British companies.
According to government statistics, this is the first time that more than 10,000 businesses were certified in a single quarter, with 10.064 standard certificates awarded. Of that number, 7,557 were recertifications, and 2507 were newly issued. Also, 3,273 Cyber Essentials Plus certificates were issued.
Over the course of the year from March 2024 to April 2025, with 49,268 issued - this included 37,309 regular Cyber Essentials certificates.
Andy Kays, CEO of Socura, said: “Every 13 minutes, a UK business achieves Cyber Essentials certification. This progress is certainly something to celebrate, yet in the grand scheme, its uptake is limited to less than one in one hundred businesses.
“While there's often an expectation that compliance processes are onerous, if you're already maintaining a decent standard of cyber hygiene, achieving Cyber Essentials certification should be straightforward.
“Given the number of high-profile breaches in the news recently, Cyber Essentials presents an important opportunity to signal to customers, partners, and suppliers that cyber security is taken seriously. It also helps organisations lay the foundations for more proactive security measures.”
Asked why they had got the certification, the largest numbers cited ‘to generally improve our security’ (3,180) and ‘To give confidence to our Customers’ by 3,961.
Written by
Dan Raywood is a B2B journalist with 25 years of experience, including covering cybersecurity for the past 17 years. He has extensively covered topics from Advanced Persistent Threats and nation-state hackers to major data breaches and regulatory changes.
He has spoken at events including 44CON, Infosecurity Europe, RANT Forum, BSides Scotland, Steelcon and the National Cyber Security Show, and served as editor of SC Media UK, Infosecurity Magazine and IT Security Guru. He was also an analyst with 451 Research and a product marketing lead at Tenable.
