I keep having the same argument about rental e-bikes with the same friend, and I now suspect we have both been wrong about the business. You know the complaint: bikes dumped across pavements, the ones that whack you if they fall on your leg, the near-misses on the towpath. Fair. But Lime’s UK accounts, filed at Companies House and dug out by the Guardian, say the thing that the pavement chaos makes hard to believe. The rentals are now properly profitable in Britain.
Sales at Lime Technologies rose a third in 2025, to £148m. Profit doubled from £1.7m to £4.7m. Average monthly users went up 31%, to just under 700,000. The fleet across England sits near 38,000 bikes and scooters after adding 4,500 more, with Nottingham since 2023 and Oxford since 2024 joining London, Milton Keynes and Salford.
Now the detail that made me reread the filing twice. That operation ran on 54 employees in 2025, up from 39. Fifty-four. The vans, the swagers as they used to be called, the depot repairs, all of it on self-employed contractors, and the number of actual staff could be smaller than the catering team at some of the companies Lime disrupted.
The scale behind it is real. The parent, Neutron Holdings, listed on Nasdaq last year at $1.7bn and Lime is part-owned by Uber; 230 cities, 29 countries, founded San Francisco 2017. TfL worked out in 2024 that one in ten of London’s 1.5 million daily cycle journeys happens on a dockless hire bike. One in ten. Ten years ago that entire market was, functionally, zero.
And yet. Rented e-bikes were reportedly behind almost a third of the cyclist-pedestrian collisions needing police. Blind and partially sighted campaigners keep raising the pavement blocking. London boroughs have seized at least 3,000 bikes this year on a Guardian count, 2,000 of them Limes. The injuries from the old heavy frames even got a nickname, Lime bike leg, which tells you something about how the design was received. The company has started bringing in a smaller bike with the battery slid back toward the rear wheel, 1,500-odd now running in England, and says 99.99% of London trips end without a reported incident.
The part I find most interesting is what happens next, because nobody has asked the operators properly yet. The English devolution bill, passed in April, hands councils fresh powers to license rental e-bike schemes and set the parking rules themselves. So a company with 54 staff is about to negotiate terms with dozens of local authorities simultaneously, each with a constituent base that has strong feelings about bikes in the road. Profitability was somehow the easy chapter. Watch this space, and watch the pavements.