What is the difference between group accounts and company accounts?

Consolidation works in four stages. The result is one set of figures for the whole group.

In law, each company is separate. A business that looks like one brand to its customers is often several companies: one that owns the property, one that employs the staff, one that holds the brand, and a parent company at the top that owns them all. Almost every one of them files its own accounts at Companies House.

Each set of company accounts shows only that one company. Its sales may be mostly to other companies in the same group, its costs may be recharges from them, and its profit may come from dividends they pay up to it. Read alone, it can give a very partial picture.

Group accounts fix this. The parent adds its own figures to those of every subsidiary it controls, then removes everything they did with each other. What is left is what the group as a whole sold to the outside world, what it spent, what it owns and what it owes. UK law requires a parent company to prepare group accounts unless it is small or one of the exemptions applies.

Aston Villa Football Club Limited files its own accounts. In the year to 30 June 2025 it reported £359.3m of turnover and a £74.5m pre-tax loss. Its staff costs were only £20.6m, for an average of 793 people: directors, commercial and operations staff, maintenance and administration, and 480 part-time matchday workers. There are no players in that list. The company describes its activity as running the commercial side of a professional football club.

The players are employed by another company in the same group. The club company is owned, through a chain of holding companies, by NSWE UK Limited, which prepares group accounts. Its list of subsidiaries includes Aston Villa FC Limited, described as the professional football club, alongside the club company, the women's team, the foundation and property companies.

NSWE UK's group accounts bring them all together. They show turnover of £378.1m, a pre-tax loss of £96.7m, and staff costs of £273.4m for 1,223 people, 294 of them players, football management and coaches. The player transfer figures are here too: the group made a £52.0m profit on selling player registrations and charged £99.7m of amortisation on the cost of players it had bought.

The balance sheets differ just as much. The club company had net assets of £5.9m; the group had £242.4m. NSWE UK on its own, as a single company, had net assets of £752.8m, almost all of it the £749.6m cost of its shares in its subsidiaries. In the group accounts that investment is replaced by what the subsidiaries own and owe, including the losses they have built up.

For anyone asking what it costs to run Aston Villa, the group accounts are the answer. The club company's accounts on their own leave out the biggest cost a football club has. Spark Intel's football pages use the NSWE UK group figures for this reason.

When a subsidiary pays a dividend to its parent, the parent counts it as income in its own accounts. In the group accounts it disappears, because the money has only moved from one pocket of the group to another. A parent's own profit can therefore be much bigger, or smaller, than anything the business earned from customers that year.

Sky UK Limited shows this clearly. In the year to 31 December 2025 it had £10,541m of revenue and an operating profit of just £7m, yet a pre-tax profit of £931m. The difference is mainly £1,254m of distributions received from its own wholly owned subsidiaries, partly offset by £507m of net losses on investments. Its accounts say the operating result is driven by recharges from other companies in the Sky group, so that other group companies recognise the group's operating profit.

None of that means the figures are wrong. They are correct for that one company. They just answer a narrower question than most readers are asking, which is how much the business makes.

Yes, when the parent company does almost all the trading itself. Greggs plc publishes its group and parent company balance sheets side by side. At 27 December 2025 the group had net assets of £625.2m and the parent company £623.7m. The two are close because almost all of Greggs' business sits in the parent company itself; the biggest single difference is £7.7m more owed to suppliers and others in the parent's balance sheet. The whole of the group's £122.2m profit after tax is dealt with in the parent company's accounts.

So the gap between group and company figures tells you something about how a business is organised. A small gap means one company does the work. A big gap, as at Aston Villa or Sky, means the trading, the staff or the profits sit in different companies from the one you are reading.

Look at the filing description on Companies House. "Group of companies' accounts" means consolidated accounts; "Full accounts" usually means one company on its own. Inside, group accounts use headings such as Consolidated statement of financial position or Group balance sheet, and usually include the parent company's own balance sheet as well.

A parent that publishes group accounts can leave out its own profit and loss account, as long as its own balance sheet shows its profit or loss for the year and the accounts say the exemption has been used (Companies Act 2006, section 408). That is why NSWE UK shows no profit and loss account of its own.

A subsidiary that is itself a parent need not prepare group accounts if it is included in the group accounts of a larger UK group, those accounts are filed with its own, and it names the parent that prepares them (section 400). Aston Villa Football Club Limited uses this exemption and names NSWE UK Limited. The notes to a subsidiary's accounts usually name its parent, and the parent that prepares group accounts: that is where to look for the group figures.

Spark Intel shows group figures wherever a business files them, because they show the whole business. Where a profile has to use one company's own accounts, it flags anything that distorts them, as with Sky's dividends from its subsidiaries.