Self-employed DBS check statistics 2026
Who is actually using the new self-employed Enhanced DBS route? Application data from the first five months.On 21 January 2026, self-employed people in England and Wales became able to apply for an enhanced DBS check without an employer for the first time. Because the route is so new, there is no public data on who is using it. We run a registered Umbrella Body platform built for self-employed applicants, so we have that data. This page shares what we are seeing, updated monthly.
Journalists, researchers and bloggers are welcome to use any figure on this page with a link to it as the source.
Key findings
- +285%Monthly applications nearly quadrupled between March and June 2026, though growth cooled to +12% in June after three months of doubling.
- 133Distinct job titles in the first five months, from orthopaedic surgeons to puppetry workshop facilitators.
- 35%Health and wellbeing professionals are the largest group, ahead of education and tutoring at 28%.
- 76%Of applications are for roles working with children. 29% work with both children and vulnerable adults.
- 1 in 7The single most common applicant is a private tutor.
- 65%Of job titles appeared only once or twice. The route's real reach is in the long tail, not the headline professions.
Demand is still growing, but the surge has cooled
Applications doubled in March, more than doubled again in April, and grew another 62% in May. June added a further 12%: the smallest monthly rise so far, but still enough to make it the busiest month on record.
The first three months looked like a launch. Each one roughly doubled the last as the route reached workers who had been told for years that they couldn't get an Enhanced check without an employer. June's slower growth is the first sign that the initial surge is settling into steadier demand rather than accelerating without limit. Whether that levels off or a fresh wave of applicants arrives over the summer is the thing we will be watching. Either way, awareness is still spreading person to person, through tutoring forums, carer networks and local authority direct payments teams.
Who is applying
Health and wellbeing professionals are the largest group at 35%: counsellors, psychotherapists, dentists, pharmacists, physiotherapists and dozens of smaller professions. This surprised us when the route opened. The public conversation about the law change focused almost entirely on tutors and carers, but self-employed health practitioners had exactly the same problem and less attention, and five months in they are comfortably the biggest single sector.
Education and tutoring is second at 28%. Tutors alone are 15% of all applications, the single most common role, with teachers close behind.
The long tail is the real story
133 distinct job titles applied in the first five months, and 65% of them appeared only once or twice. Among them: an end-of-life doula, a BSL interpreter, an adaptive surf practitioner, an overseas student guardian, a children's aerial instructor and an ear health care practitioner.
This is what the January 2026 change actually did. The headline professions always had workarounds, such as agencies willing to sponsor a check. The long tail had nothing. A self-employed end-of-life doula had no employer, no agency and no route to an Enhanced check at all.
Who applicants work with
76% of applications are for roles working with children, including the 29% who work with both children and vulnerable adults. Roles working solely with vulnerable adults are 14%.
Worth sitting with for a moment: before 21 January 2026, the majority of these applicants, people working unsupervised with children, had no way to obtain the level of check that would reveal whether they were barred from that work.
Methodology
Figures are drawn from applications started on the self-employed-dbs.co.uk platform between 11 February and 30 June 2026. February is a partial month: the route opened on 21 January and our first applications arrived mid-February. June is the first complete month included in this update. July is excluded, as only a few days of data are available at the time of writing. Percentages for roles, sectors and workforce use applications with a recorded job title as the base. Sector groupings are assigned from applicants' stated job titles. Growth is indexed to February = 100 using a consistent February base across updates, so month-on-month figures stay comparable between reports. We publish percentages and growth rates rather than raw volumes. We are one platform among several registered Umbrella Bodies, so these figures describe our applicant base rather than the whole market, though we are not aware of any other published data on this route.
To cite this page: "Self-Employed DBS Statistics 2026, self-employed-dbs.co.uk" with a link. For press enquiries or the underlying percentages in table form, contact us via the support form.