Annual report 2025

From FTSE 100 boardrooms to founders of AIM‑listed innovators, Grant Thornton UK advises businesses across the full spectrum of the UK economy. We support 61% of the FTSE 100 and 42% of the FTSE 350 with insight‑led advisory services. Our experience is truly global. We have worked with 17 of the 20 largest European and US banks and delivered more than $5bn in asset recoveries across more than 65 jurisdictions.  

The midmarket is where the UK’s growth story is being written, and no other firm understands it better. We are recognised as the UK’s second most active M&A financial adviser in 2025. 

We are also the clear market leader in Local Public Audit, holding a 35% share of NHS audits and partnering with over half of all UK councils. Our analytics platforms empower more than 1,000 public service professionals and underpins trusted relationships across major government and public sector frameworks. 

Our clients don’t only trust our credentials. They trust us because we lead with empathy and authenticity. That’s why in 2025 we launched our award-winning brand campaign, Alternatively, a confident, creative articulation of who we are and how we show up. 

2025 has been a landmark year for Grant Thornton UK. A year in which we didn’t just adapt to change, we redefined what a modern professional services firm can be. 

From completing our historic transaction with Cinven to establishing an Employee Benefit Trust, 2025 was a year defined by truly transformative milestones. We rewarded our people with a £39 million exceptional bonus, invested £1 million in digital‑mindset training for our most senior and most junior colleagues, and continued to deliver high‑quality work throughout. It was the start of our journey to redefine what modern professional services can be. 

Our 2025 story is shaped by bold decisions, exceptional people and the first steps in a transformation that’s gaining momentum at pace for the benefit of our clients and our people. This has laid the foundation for our next milestone (announced in early 2026), a £500 million investment to redesign how an audit, tax and advisory firm works, putting people, data and digital tools at the heart of an altogether better client experience. 

In 2025, we became the largest UK professional services firm to take external equity investment, a landmark transaction with international private equity firm Cinven that opened an exciting new chapter in our history.

This was a statement of intent: that we’re ready to compete differently, invest boldly and build the firm of the future.

Consistent high quality is our foundation. Our firm has an unprecedented quality record and we have been market leaders in quality for over five years.  Our focus on quality throughout the breadth of our services remains unwavering.

Across audit, tax and advisory, every engagement is built on rigorous methodologies, advanced digital technology and expert human judgment, so our teams can go deeper and deliver more valuable insights.  

Strong governance underpins this. In August 2025, Stuart Quickenden joined as Chair of our Board, bringing with him over 25 years of strategic leadership at Boston Consulting Group, including as Chair for the UK and Ireland. He is joined by Independent Non‑Executives Imogen Joss and Andrew Silverbeck, whose experience across myriad sectors of the economy strengthens both challenge and oversight.

To further reinforce the public‑interest mandate of our audit practice, we also welcomed Independent Non‑Executives Michael Izza CBE FCA and Reza Hazemi to our Audit Oversight Board, ensuring our quality ambition is matched by robust, experienced challenge and scrutiny. 

In February 2025 we announced a groundbreaking £1 million investment in an industry-first business transformation programme with Data Literacy Academy. Unlike traditional data training programmes that emphasise data analysis skills, our pioneering programme is designed to equip our people with the ability to approach every opportunity and challenge through an innovative, data-driven digital perspective for the benefit of our clients.

This investment also complements the firm’s welcome of our newest group of digital audit trainees, who joined our early careers programme for the first time in 2025. These new trainees specialise in areas such as analytics, automation, cloud technologies and digital transformation – bringing fresh capabilities into our audit practice and helping us continue accelerating our digital innovation. 

In May 2025, our partners voted to allocate an unprecedented additional £39 million as an exceptional bonus to thank our employees for their impact on the firm’s financial, quality and cultural performance. The largest bonus investment in our history which was in addition to our usual annual bonus payments.

We also launched our new Employee Benefit Trust, a market leading reward initiative that gives many of our people a real stake in our future. Eligible colleagues, both current and future, were allocated (and can continue to earn) equity units that grow in value as our firm grows, creating a direct link between their impact and our success.  

This bold move reflects our commitment to recognising contributions, empowering our people and shaping a shared future built on collective achievement.

We continued to invest in our people with the launch of Reward+ in November 2025, our new reward, recognition and wellbeing platform that allows our people to shape a market leading benefits package that works for them.

We also continued to invest in sponsorship, coaching and career support for underrepresented talent to strengthen progression and retention. In 2025 we launched Catalyst, our new flagship development programme for high-performing, high-potential underrepresented talent at manager, senior manager and associate director levels, recognising intersectionality across all strands of diversity and building on the great work done to date, but taking it to a new level. 

As we continue our journey from great to exceptional, we launched our first culture statement in 2025, setting out what our culture looks like, what we believe, how we behave and what this means for all of us every day.  

We remain committed to inclusion and to building a high-performing culture where everyone can thrive.

And this is beyond words – we've been successful in translating words into reality. For example, our gender pay gap has halved since 2022, falling from 22% to 11% in 2025. This improvement is driven primarily by increased female representation in senior roles – particularly at director level, which has risen from 22% female talent in 2022 to 37% in 2025.  

Our impact extends beyond the firm. In 2025, nearly 900 colleagues supported more than 3,000 young people through education and employability programmes. Our CEO, Malcolm Gomersall, was named Social Mobility Champion of the Year at the 2025 SOMO Awards and, as a firm, we ranked 11th in the Index.

We are proud signatories of the Race at Work Charter and the Black Talent Charter. Our partner, Amaechi Nsofor, was named Professional Senior Leader of the Year at the Black Scottish Awards. Building on this momentum, we celebrated Black excellence through Portraits of Power, a visual campaign honouring influential Black colleagues and inspiring individuals from across a breadth of professions.

Our high-performing culture continues to be recognised, including honours such as Times Top 50 Employer for Gender Equality, Top 10 Employer for Working Families, Stonewall Gold and the BDF Smart Audit Bronze. We were one of the first firms accredited as a Family Friendly Workplace. 

Great firms are built by great people. That’s why we announced plans to recruit 160 equity partners over the next two years, to complement our high number of internal equity partner promotions - the most ambitious expansion in our history and one where Q1 2026 shows we are on track to deliver this significant expansion in our equity partner team.

Our unique equity partner model breaks with tradition, offering market-leading in year rewards together with equity representing a genuine opportunity to share in our future growth. 

We are reimagining our workplaces to reduce our environmental impact and set a higher standard across the industry. Our new London headquarters achieved a 79% reduction in embodied carbon compared to the industry average and ensured that 100% of construction and demolition waste was diverted from landfill. We also delivered a 56% reduction in furniture‑related embodied carbon against industry norms and reduced water use by 40% from baseline across all new plumbing fixtures. This project was further recognised with a 2025 Planet Positive Award for its innovation in embodied‑carbon reduction.  

Inclusion was central to the project, we prioritised both our people and our partners, sourcing 78% of subcontractors from local businesses and engaging 70% diverse suppliers. Accessible features such as automatic doors, wellness spaces and multifaith rooms help create an inclusive environment that supports diverse cultural, religious, and mental health needs. These outcomes build on our science‑based climate ambition and integrated approach to sustainability, embedding circularity, wellbeing and inclusive design into the places where our people and clients collaborate.