The Insolvency Service recorded an individual insolvency rate of 27.1 per 10,000 adults over the twelve months to 30 June 2026, up from 24.2 a year earlier1. The Insolvency Service is the government agency that administers insolvency law and publishes the statistics monthly. In plainer terms, roughly one adult in 369 went formally insolvent over the year, against one in 413 the year before. Against a UK adult population of around 54 million that is something like 15,000 more people a year reaching a formal insolvency procedure. We calculated that from the published rate; the agency itself prints no such comparison.
Underneath that figure, household finances look thin rather than collapsing. The savings ratio fell to 8.9% in the first quarter of 2026 from 9.6%, meaning households put aside £8.90 of every £100 of after-tax income instead of £9.602. Real regular pay grew 0.1% over the year once inflation is stripped out, about £30 a year on a £30,000 salary before tax. Employment held at 75.0% of working-age adults. People are largely in work and barely getting ahead, and the buffer they would draw on in a bad month is smaller than it was.
The Resolution Foundation, a think tank focused on low- and middle-income households, projects typical non-pensioner incomes rising 1.2% in 2026-27, and 4.7% for the poorer half of non-pensioner families, before stagnating again later in the decade3. Its named mechanism for that later stagnation matters for this register, because it is the same one the sovereign ledger relies on: frozen tax thresholds pulling more income into tax as wages rise, alongside council tax and housing costs. Our trigger on this ledger, declared today, is an insolvency rate above 30.0 per 10,000 adults.
