There are 817 notaries, or 777, and nobody tells you which one you are looking at
Every one of these professions has two sizes: the number of entries in the public register, and the number in the regulator's annual report. They differ every time, by between 3% and 18%, and neither document says so.
By Rose Traviss · 29 September 2026
The Faculty Office’s public “find a notary” directory returns 817 entries. The Faculty Office’s own Registrar’s Annual Report 2026 says 777 notaries took out a practising certificate for the current practising year.
Both are published by the same regulator. Neither mentions the other.
| Profession | In the public register | The regulator’s own figure | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Licensed conveyancers | 2,428 | 2,064 licences at 31 Mar 2026 | +364 (+18%) |
| Patent and trade mark attorneys | 3,924 | 3,809 on the registers at 31 Dec 2025 | +115 (+3%) |
| Notaries | 817 | 777 practising certificates, 2026 | +40 (+5%) |
| Costs lawyers | 789 | 763 regulated at 31 Dec 2025 | +26 (+3%) |
None of these is an error by anybody. They count different things on different days. The point is that a reader with one number has no way of knowing which.
What each gap is made of
Notaries, +40. The directory carries no status flag, so a notary who has not renewed cannot be told apart from one who has. The Registrar’s report supplies the likely bulk of the difference itself: 71 individuals eligible to apply did not submit an application for a practising certificate this year, up from 54 the year before. It also gives a third number — 760 notaries held a current certificate in the practising year ended 31 October 2025 — so the same report offers two sizes of the profession a page apart, for two different practising years.
Patent and trade mark attorneys, +115. These are the same population measured nine months apart. IPReg’s figure closed on 31 December 2025; this site’s snapshot was taken in September 2026. IPReg’s own reports show the registers growing by 114 in 2025, 106 in 2024 and 159 in 2023 — so a nine-month gain of 115 is exactly the run rate. This one is agreement, not discrepancy.
Licensed conveyancers, +364. The largest gap, and the one with the clearest structural explanation: the CLC’s figure counts individual licences, and the register this site reads includes people the CLC publishes who do not hold a licence in their own name. The CLC’s own table splits its 2,064 into 1,801 employed and 263 managers, by authorisation — probate, conveyancing, or both.
Costs lawyers, +26. Nine months again. The CLSB closed its count on 31 December 2025 and reports 52 new entrants a year, so a register read the following September would be expected to hold roughly forty more.
Why this is worth saying out loud
Because these numbers get quoted. “There are 800 notaries in England and Wales” is the sort of sentence that ends up in a consultation response, a news story or a parliamentary answer, and the person writing it has taken whichever figure they found first.
Two of the four gaps above turn out on inspection to be timing, which is benign. Two of them — the notaries and the conveyancers — are differences of definition that persist no matter when you look, and those are the ones where citing the wrong number gets you a wrong answer.
What this site does with it
It publishes both, with the difference and an explanation of what is being compared, on every profession page and on the reports page. Where a regulator explains the gap itself, the explanation is the regulator’s own words. Where it does not, the gap is stated and left alone rather than reconciled with a guess.
No total across professions is offered anywhere. The Faculty Office counts a Roll at 1 April, the CLC a licence at 31 March and IPReg a registration at 31 December, and adding those would produce a number that nobody published and nobody could check.
The figures
Register counts as collected on 27 September 2026. Regulators’ figures read from the Faculty Office’s Registrar’s Annual Report 2026, IPReg’s Annual Report 2025, the CLC’s Indicators and Metrics: Quarter 1 2026, and the CLSB’s Annual Report 2025 — each linked, with the sentence it came from, on the reports page.