The Insolvency Service put the company insolvency rate at 50.5 per 10,000 companies in the year to 30 June 2026, down from 52.4 1. That is roughly one company in 198 failing across those twelve months. The 2008-09 recession peaked at 113.1 per 10,000, so the current rate sits at 44.7% of that peak, and it is still falling.
The number of companies registered in Britain has grown for years, which is why the rate rather than the count is the honest measure. A rising raw tally of failures can sit happily alongside falling distress; report the tally and you manufacture a crisis out of arithmetic. Any headline about record company failures that does not divide by the number of companies is measuring the wrong thing.
The Insolvency Service publishes the household and corporate figures on the same day, on the same twelve-month basis, and they point in opposite directions: businesses failing less often, individuals failing more often. That pattern fits an economy where employment holds up, firms have absorbed the interest rate cycle, and the pressure has landed on personal balance sheets through prices and tax rather than through job losses. Our declared trigger on the corporate ledger is a rate back above 60.0 per 10,000, which would take a genuine turn rather than a wobble to reach.
