Not every liquidation is a failure: how to read the UK insolvency figures
The Insolvency Service published its September 2026 figures on 20 October. There were 1,882 company insolvencies in England and Wales, 4% fewer than in August and 5% fewer than in September 2025. Creditors' voluntary liquidations, the largest group, were similar to August and lower than a year earlier. Over the last twelve months, 49.9 in every 10,000 companies entered insolvency, down from 52.8 the year before.
Those are the official figures, and they are carefully compiled. But anyone who works from Companies House data, or reads a count of "liquidations" built from it, needs to know about one large group of companies that the official statistics deliberately leave out.
Two kinds of voluntary liquidation
A company can be wound up voluntarily in two quite different situations.
A members' voluntary liquidation (MVL) is a solvent wind-down. The directors swear a declaration that the company can pay its debts in full, and the owners close it, usually to take out what is left as capital. Retiring owners, finished projects and holding companies that are no longer needed are typical. Nobody goes unpaid.
A creditors' voluntary liquidation (CVL) is an insolvency. The company cannot pay its debts, and its creditors take part in the process. This is the procedure most people mean when they talk about a business failing, and it is the largest single type in the official figures.
The Insolvency Service counts CVLs and excludes MVLs, which is right. The difficulty is that the form that starts both at Companies House, the appointment of a liquidator, is the same for each. Any count of liquidations taken from Companies House filings alone mixes solvent closures with insolvencies.
How large the gap is
At Senserity we matched every liquidation on the Companies House register against its notice in The London Gazette, which publishes members' and creditors' liquidations in separate sections. Where the Gazette notice has not yet appeared, the type of winding-up resolution filed on the same day usually settles it.
In England and Wales in 2025 there were 8,070 members' voluntary liquidations. That is equivalent to about a third of the 23,938 company insolvencies the Insolvency Service recorded for the year. Counting them as failures would overstate failures by roughly that much.
Our creditors' voluntary liquidation count for 2025, on the same basis as the official statistics, is 18,597. The Insolvency Service's is 18,525. The two agree to within half of one per cent, which is a useful check that the classification works.
Solvent closures are what moves
The two series behave very differently. These are companies in England and Wales, by the quarter their liquidation began:
| Quarter | Creditors' voluntary liquidations | Members' voluntary liquidations (solvent) |
|---|---|---|
| Jul to Sep 2024 | 4,655 | 3,041 |
| Oct to Dec 2024 | 4,557 | 4,022 |
| Jan to Mar 2025 | 4,675 | 3,308 |
| Apr to Jun 2025 | 4,765 | 1,370 |
| Jul to Sep 2025 | 4,635 | 1,390 |
| Oct to Dec 2025 | 4,522 | 2,002 |
| Jan to Mar 2026 | 4,364 | 2,914 |
| Apr to Jun 2026 | 4,465 | 1,068 |
Creditors' liquidations have stayed between 4,364 and 4,765 a quarter for two years. Members' liquidations have swung between about 1,000 and 4,000, peaking in the quarters before each rise in Business Asset Disposal Relief: from 10% to 14% in April 2025, and from 14% to 18% in April 2026. Owners planning to close a company had a clear reason to do it before the rate went up.
Between the first and second quarters of 2026, voluntary liquidations of both kinds fell by 24%. Creditors' liquidations, the insolvent ones, rose by 2%. A headline built on all voluntary liquidations would have reported a sharp improvement that did not happen.
Other things that move a monthly figure
Monthly insolvency numbers can also jump for reasons a reader would not guess. Administrations rose sharply this spring. The Insolvency Service attributes much of that to more than 250 connected real estate companies entering administration between March and August 2026. Our own series shows the same thing: 619 administrations in England and Wales in the first quarter of 2026, against between about 300 and 400 in each quarter of 2025. A cluster like that tells you a great deal about one property group and very little about the economy.
What this means for supplier checks
For anyone assessing a supplier, the national count of liquidations is background, not evidence. What matters is the supplier's own public record, and that record usually shows trouble well before any formal procedure begins. Across the UK, one in four companies that file accounts at Companies House currently shows two or more warning signs on the public record: a balance sheet in the red, overdue filings, an outstanding floating charge, a proposal to strike the company off, and so on. None of those signals predicts that a particular company will fail. Each is a reason to look more closely before extending credit or signing a contract.
Three practical points follow:
- Read liquidation headlines with care. Check whether a figure counts creditors' liquidations only, or all liquidations. The difference is about a third.
- Check the type when a supplier goes into liquidation. A members' voluntary liquidation of a group's dormant subsidiary is routine. A creditors' liquidation of the company that holds your contract is not.
- Watch the record, not the headlines. Late accounts, an overdue confirmation statement or a new charge on a supplier you depend on are worth a conversation now, whatever the national figures say.
The full quarterly series, how it is built and a free CSV download are on our liquidations by quarter page. The wider picture of warning signs across UK companies, by sector, size and area, is on the UK Supplier Risk Index statistics hub.
Figures are distinct companies by the date their case began, for companies registered in England and Wales, from the series built on 13 October 2026. Official figures are from the Insolvency Service's Company Insolvency Statistics: the September 2026 release for monthly figures and the December 2025 release for 2025 totals.