How many employees does a company have? 7 ways to check

How many employees does a company have? The fastest answer is its LinkedIn page, which shows two different numbers: a size range the company picks itself, and a count of members who list it as their employer. The exact answer, where one exists, is in a filing: the human capital section of a US public company's 10-K, or the average employee note in UK company accounts.

For a competitor, though, the more useful question is where they are adding people. Job posts answer that, months before the result shows up anywhere else.

How many employees does a company have? Seven sources

1. The LinkedIn page

The company page shows a company size range, such as 51 to 200, which the page admin selects and often never updates. It also shows how many members are associated with it.

LinkedIn's help explains where that second number comes from: when members add a job to their profile and select the company, "they automatically appear on that organization's LinkedIn Page". Changes can take up to 30 days to show.

The count is skewed in predictable ways. It over-represents office, sales and engineering roles, and under-represents hourly, frontline and field staff who are less often on LinkedIn. It includes contractors and agency staff who list the client, and former staff who never changed their profile. For a software company it can be close. For a restaurant group or a cleaning company it can be a fraction of the real number.

For a rough breakdown, search people with the company as their current employer and filter by location or title.

2. LinkedIn Premium company insights

With Premium Business, Sales Navigator and some Recruiter plans, a company page has an Insights tab. LinkedIn's help lists what it shows: total employee count over time, headcount distribution and growth by function, notable alumni, and total job openings by seniority and function.

The trend is the valuable part, because the bias stays roughly constant within one company. A sales function up 40% in a year means something even if the base number is off. Pages with fewer than 30 employee profiles show no insights at all.

3. A public company's 10-K

US public companies state headcount in the human capital section of their annual report, and the detail goes well beyond a total.

Semrush's 10-K for 2025 reports 1,567 full-time employees on 31 December 2025, with 494 in Spain, 324 in the United States and 137 each in Germany and Serbia. It also gives 515 full-time employees plus 71 contractors in sales and marketing, and 584 plus 55 contractors in product and development. That tells you where a competitor builds and sells, not just how big it is.

For comparison, Similarweb's free page for semrush.com shows an employee range of 1,001 to 5,000 on the same day. Correct, and five times wide.

4. UK company accounts

On Companies House, open the company's Filing history, filter to Accounts, open the latest PDF and search for "average number".

The average number of employees is a mandatory note for every company, micro companies included, and ACCA's guidance for accountants states it "cannot be filleted out of the accounts for filing purposes". It counts people on contracts of service, including executive directors.

Two catches. It is an average over the financial year, so a company that doubled during the year shows somewhere in between. And private companies have nine months after their year end to file, so the figure can be well over a year old by the time you read it.

5. The UK gender pay gap service

Employers with a headcount of 250 or more on their snapshot date must report their gender pay gap each year. Search the employer at gender-pay-gap.service.gov.uk and the report shows a size band: 250 to 499, 500 to 999, 1,000 to 4,999, 5,000 to 19,999, or 20,000 or more.

The band is coarse, but it is reported by the employer and dated. A competitor that moves up a band between years has crossed a real threshold.

6. US Form 5500

US companies with a 401(k) or similar benefit plan file Form 5500 with the Department of Labor each year, and the form reports the number of plan participants. Search the employer in the Department of Labor's Form 5500 Search at efast.dol.gov.

It counts US staff in the plan, not total headcount, and it is filed months after the plan year ends. As a check on a LinkedIn figure for a US competitor, it is one of the few hard numbers available for a private company.

7. Team pages, now and archived

Count the people on their about or team page. Some sites give each person a profile page and list them in the sitemap, which makes the count a one-line job.

Then pull the same page from a year and two years ago, using the Wayback Machine guide. Team pages show who a company chooses to show, often leadership only, so treat them as a floor and a growth rate rather than a total.

Headcount also feeds a revenue estimate. The guide to finding a company's revenue shows how to turn it into a range.

Reading a competitor's hiring as strategy

Headcount tells you size. Job posts tell you intent.

Where to find every open role

Start at their careers page. Most link to a hiring platform, and the three common ones publish every open role as a public feed you can save:

https://boards-api.greenhouse.io/v1/boards/COMPANY/jobs
https://api.lever.co/v0/postings/COMPANY?mode=json
https://api.ashbyhq.com/posting-api/job-board/COMPANY

Replace COMPANY with the name in their careers link, for example the part after job-boards.greenhouse.io/ or jobs.lever.co/. Each returns every open role with its title, team and location. LinkedIn Jobs and Indeed catch the rest.

What new roles reveal

A first hire in a function. A first product marketing manager means positioning work is coming. A first head of partnerships means a channel push. A first enterprise account executive means they are moving upmarket, and their pricing page will change to match.

A new location. Sales roles in a country where they have no office usually come before a localised site and local pricing.

Named tools and integrations. Engineering posts asking for experience with a platform they do not integrate with yet describe their roadmap.

The balance between teams. Ten engineering roles and one marketing role is a build phase. The reverse is a growth push, and their ads and content are about to increase.

The problem statements. "What you will do" sections describe what is not working today. A support role "to rebuild our onboarding" is an admission.

Contraction. Roles pulled after a week, a careers page emptied, "no open positions". In the US, larger employers must give advance notice of mass layoffs under the WARN Act, and many states publish those notices.

A monthly hiring watch

1. On the first of each month, save each competitor's open roles from the feeds above or their careers page.
2. Compare with last month's list: which roles are new, which closed.
3. Tag each new role by function and location.
4. Write one line per competitor: what they appear to be building.

Careers pages are one of the pages worth watching in the guide to tracking competitor website changes, and the monthly list is the cheapest early warning there is. Figo does not track LinkedIn or job boards, so this one stays a manual job. For what a competitor publishes on LinkedIn rather than who works there, see LinkedIn competitor analysis.