The Insolvency Service published its July statistics on 18 August 2026, putting the individual insolvency rate at 27.8 per 10,000 adults for the twelve months to 31 July, up from 24.3 a year earlier1. The register counts people in England and Wales who entered a formal insolvency procedure: a bankruptcy, a debt relief order, or an Individual Voluntary Arrangement. Its headline rate is a rolling twelve-month total measured against the adult population, so it should never be read as a figure for a single month.
Beneath it sit 11,926 individual insolvencies recorded during July alone, seasonally adjusted to strip out the usual monthly pattern2. The rolling rate works out at roughly one adult in 360, against one in 369 on last month's vintage of 27.1. For the twelve months to July 2009, at the bottom of the last recession, the comparable rate stood at 29.4.
This desk declared a trigger on the household ledger at 30.0 last month, before the July release existed. The distance to it has narrowed from 2.9 to 2.2 in one monthly release. A line drawn in advance and then approached on schedule tells a reader something a trend line cannot, because nobody could move the line afterwards to fit the news.
A household does not notice a rate. It notices the letter that arrives with a case number on it, and 11,926 of those letters landed in a single month.
