Where UK companies are closing fastest, and what it tells you
76,840 UK businesses closed in a single quarter, and closures rose in 11 of the 16 main trades. Closures are treated as bad news and largely ignored. They are the most useful number on the sheet if you sell to businesses.
76,840 UK businesses closed in the second quarter of 2026 alone. That was 2.0% more than the same quarter a year earlier, and closures rose in 11 of the 16 main trades.
Closures get read as bad news and then ignored. They are the most practically useful number on the sheet if you sell to businesses, because they tell you how fast your list is rotting.
The recent picture
In April to June 2026, 76,840 businesses came off the ONS count, against 79,325 added. So slightly more opened than closed, which is the normal pattern.
The sharpest recent move was in agriculture, forestry and fishing, where closures rose 28.4% against the same quarter a year before, the largest increase of any main group.
One quarter is not a trend, and a single sector's quarterly jump can come from a change in how a small population behaves. But a 28.4% rise is large enough to be worth watching in the next release rather than dismissing.
Rates, not counts, for comparing trades
Over a full year, the highest closing rate of the main trades in 2024 was transport and storage at 16.5%, against a UK average of 9.8%.
That trade also had the highest opening rate, at 15.6%, which is what churn looks like: a great deal of movement in both directions. Read the opening rate alone and it looks like the best market in the country. The worked version is in the fastest growing UK industries.
At the other end, finance and insurance closed 6.6% and opened 6.7%. Almost nothing moves.
Lists rot. This one is checked every month.
Tell us the kind of company you sell to. We find them on the public record, check the website and the email, and hand you the list. It takes about two minutes instead of an afternoon.
Regional differences are real
Closings vary by place as well as trade.
Northern Ireland closed 7.3% of its businesses in 2024, the lowest rate in the UK, alongside the lowest opening rate at 9.5%. London, the West Midlands and the North West all sat above the UK average on closings.
Survival puts a finer point on it. Of businesses that started in 2019, 43.5% in the South West were still trading five years later against 30.6% in the West Midlands. Same country, very different odds. More in where new UK businesses are being created.
The bit that costs money: list decay
This is the practical reason to care.
If you sell into a trade with a 16.5% annual closing rate, then in the year after you build a list, roughly one company in six on it will no longer be trading. If you sell into finance at 6.6%, it is closer to one in fifteen.
That is before you count everything else that changes: firms that move, rename, change directors, or simply stop answering the address you have. Closure is only the most final form of a list going stale.
Two things follow:
- A bought list is a depreciating asset, and the depreciation rate is published, per trade. You can calculate it.
- A standing search beats a purchase. Something that keeps checking is worth more than something that was accurate once.
"Closed" does not mean "failed"
Worth repeating, because it changes the tone of the whole subject.
The ONS counts a business as closed when it stops being registered for VAT or PAYE. Some of those failed. Others were sold, merged, wound up deliberately by an owner retiring, or shrank below the threshold and carried on trading quietly. The statistics cannot separate them.
So a high closing rate is a signal about churn and about how quickly your data ages. It is not, on its own, a verdict on an industry's health.
How we handle it
Every company on our own list is re-checked monthly against the public record, and a company that leaves it stops appearing in searches. That is not a feature so much as the minimum honest response to a 9.8% national closing rate: a list that is never re-checked is wrong by design.
For checking one specific company rather than a market, filings are the better source, and the mechanics are in Companies House deadlines explained.
Where these figures come from
Quarterly figures are from the ONS quarterly business demography release for April to June 2026, published 30 July 2026. Annual closing rates, regional splits and survival figures are from *Business demography, UK: 2024*, published 20 November 2025.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Work from a list that gets checked
Leadistry reads the live UK public record and re-checks it monthly, so what you get is the firms that are still there, each with a working website and a verified business email.
Counting is free. Start free with 25 leads.
Common questions
How many UK businesses closed recently?
76,840 businesses were removed from the ONS count in April to June 2026, 2.0% more than the same quarter a year earlier. Closures rose in 11 of the 16 main industrial groups.
Which UK industry is closing the most businesses?
By rate, transport and storage had the highest closing rate of the main trades in 2024, at 16.5%. By recent change, agriculture, forestry and fishing saw the largest rise in closures in the second quarter of 2026, up 28.4% year on year.
Why do business closure rates matter for sales?
Because they tell you how fast a list of companies goes out of date. In a trade closing about one in six businesses a year, a list bought in January is materially wrong by the summer.