Updated on every Insolvency Service release
The Insolvency Service publishes company insolvency figures monthly. This page tracks the headline count, the procedure mix, the twelve-month liquidation rate and the sectors taking the most damage.
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| Sector | Cases | Share of known-sector cases |
|---|
These are volumes, not failure rates. Bigger sectors have more registered companies and so more insolvencies. Sector is taken from the company's own first recorded SIC code.
| Jurisdiction | Insolvencies | Rate per 10,000 | Basis |
|---|
Scotland and Northern Ireland are published unadjusted, so their figures are not directly comparable with the seasonally adjusted England and Wales headline.
Insolvency statistics get reported every month as a barometer of the economy. They are more useful than that. A company failure is not one event, it is a chain: the failed company owed money to suppliers who now will not be paid, and each of those suppliers takes a hit to working capital they did not budget for.
That is why the sector table matters more than the headline number. Construction sits at the top of it almost every month, and construction is also the sector with the longest payment chains, retention clauses and the most exposure to a single main contractor going down. Long payment terms and high failure rates are the same problem viewed from two ends.
If you supply a sector that is high in this table, two things follow. Debtor concentration is a real risk rather than a theoretical one, and the gap between doing the work and getting paid is the window in which someone else's failure becomes your problem.
Periods differ between the panels on this page. The headline count and procedure split are for the latest single month. The sector table is a rolling twelve-month total, because monthly sector counts are too small to be meaningful. The two are not directly comparable.
The figures count companies entering formal insolvency procedures: compulsory liquidations, creditors' voluntary liquidations, administrations, company voluntary arrangements and receivership appointments. They are registrations with Companies House rather than the date a procedure began, so there is a lag. The England and Wales series is seasonally adjusted; Scotland and Northern Ireland are published unadjusted and are not directly comparable.
Note also that a rising count and a rising rate are different things. The number of companies on the register has grown substantially over the past two decades, so a headline count similar to a previous peak can represent a much lower share of companies actually failing. The rate per 10,000 companies is the honest comparison.
You cannot control which one. You can control how long your money sits in someone else's bank account. Compare invoice finance facilities from UK lenders against your own ledger.
Compare facilitiesSource: Insolvency Service company insolvency statistics, England and Wales, seasonally adjusted, with Companies House register data for rates. Figures are as published and subject to revision. Built and maintained by Factor Now.