England and Wales have recorded around 24,000 company insolvencies a year since 2023, the highest sustained level in three decades, but the total has stopped climbing.1 The first half of 2026 ran 7% below the first half of 2025. Construction, hospitality and retail still carry the load, and a real-estate lender's collapse briefly distorted the spring figures.2 Age data shows the elevated rate is being driven by established businesses, not new startups: firms aged seven to ten years now have the highest insolvency rate of any age cohort.5
Company insolvencies in England and Wales rose sharply as pandemic-era support was withdrawn, from 12,632 in 2020 to a 30-year high of 25,158 in 2023.4 Since then the annual total has held almost flat: 23,872 in 2024 and 23,938 in 2025, both within 1% of each other and about 5% below the 2023 peak.4 The first half of 2026 continued that pattern rather than breaking from it: 11,442 insolvencies, 7% fewer than the 12,345 recorded in the first half of 2025, with five of the first six months running below their 2025 equivalents.2
The Insolvency Service's own commentary notes that monthly volumes since November 2025 have run about 8% below the average of the preceding three years, driven mainly by fewer creditors' voluntary liquidations (CVLs) — the most common route into insolvency and 74% of all cases in June 2026.2 One reading is that the businesses most exposed to post-pandemic cost pressure have already failed, in the 2022–2023 surge that took CVLs to a record high; what remains is a smaller, still-elevated pool of ongoing distress rather than a fresh wave building underneath it.1
Construction accounted for the most company insolvencies of any sector in the year to June 2026 (3,805), ahead of wholesale and retail trade (3,463) and accommodation and food services (3,233); together, retail and hospitality made up 29% of all insolvencies with an industry recorded over that year.1 These are also large sectors by company count, so a raw ranking partly reflects how many firms operate in each — not necessarily a higher failure rate.1
For every one of these larger sectors, insolvencies in the year to June 2026 were lower than in the year to June 2025, with falls ranging from 1% (professional and technical services) to 10% (administrative and support services).1 R3, the insolvency practitioners' trade body, cautions that this may be temporary: hospitality has had a seasonal lift from the football World Cup, a heatwave and Wimbledon, while high business rates and labour costs continue to squeeze margins underneath it.3
The most dramatic-looking number in this data — administrations up 80% year-on-year in June 2026 — is also the most misleading if read without its cause. Administrations (a rescue-first procedure, distinct from the liquidations that make up most insolvencies) spiked in March, April and June 2026 specifically, not steadily across the half-year.1 R3 attributes the run of linked filings to the ripple effects of a single event: the collapse of a mortgage lender that left a chain of connected real-estate companies unable to continue trading, with roughly 260 such companies entering administration across the first half of the year and around 60 in June alone.3
This is a textbook small-denominator artefact: a handful of legally distinct but commercially linked companies, entering administration together, can move a national monthly total by dozens of cases without reflecting any broader change in business conditions. Strip out administrations and the underlying liquidation trend — CVLs and compulsory liquidations, which made up 96% of June's total — was falling, not rising.1
A separate Insolvency Service dataset tracks the age of each business at the point of insolvency, matching Companies House records to the ONS's business register.5 It answers a different question from the counts above: not how many businesses fail, but which ones. Businesses under two years old have the lowest insolvency rate of any age band — 37 per 10,000 in 2025 — and businesses under four years old make up only 18% of insolvencies despite being roughly a third of all active businesses, meaning young companies are under-represented among failures, not over-represented.5
The riskiest age band has shifted outward. Businesses aged four to seven years had the highest insolvency rate every year from 2015 to 2024, peaking at 203 per 10,000 in 2023; by 2025 that band's rate had eased to 169. The seven-to-ten-year band overtook it in 2025, reaching 170 per 10,000 — the largest increase of any age band since 2015 (+88 per 10,000), while two-to-four-year-olds are the only band to see a decrease over the same period.5 The Insolvency Service's own reading is direct: the increase in the overall insolvency rate since 2015 was driven by businesses more than four years old.
5
Insolvency figures count formal legal procedures, not business closures generally — solvent shutdowns, and firms that simply stop trading without entering a formal process, aren't captured here.1 Roughly 2% of insolvencies in the year to June 2026 have no industry recorded yet, slightly more than a year earlier, so the sector breakdown will be revised.1 The age-band data (Exhibit 04) is labelled "statistics in development" by its publisher, with a methodology review due in 2027, and it doesn't establish why the 7–10-year cohort is now highest-risk; the Insolvency Service notes businesses currently aged four to seven were formed in 2018–2021 and so may carry pandemic-era scarring, but stops short of naming cause, and this desk hasn't found a study that isolates one.5 And insolvency data is lagging by design: R3 itself cautions these are June conditions showing up in July, and that renewed cost pressure since — from a resumed Middle East conflict pushing up fuel prices — may not surface in the count for months.3
Practitioners who track this data monthly genuinely disagree about what H1 2026 means for the rest of the year. This is an empirical dispute — more months of data could resolve it — not a values question.
CVLs and compulsory liquidations were both down double digits year-on-year in June, and the fall has held for months, not one. One insolvency partner called the combination of falling liquidations and fewer CVAs "a reassuring sign" that the market is finding a lower, steadier level after the 2023 record.3
Others argue one soft half-year is not a trend reversal. A restructuring lawyer noted it is "too early to call if this is a pivot point," since the same six months benefited from temporary tailwinds — a summer consumer lift and, briefly, falling energy costs — that are already fading as autumn approaches.3