Registrar struck off 174,269 companies in six months
Nearly half of recent UK company closures were ordered by Companies House rather than chosen by directors, and £129m of leftover assets went to the Crown.
Companies House recorded 371,269 dissolutions between April and September 2026. Of those, 174,269 — 46.9 per cent — were compulsory strike-offs by the Registrar of Companies.
Directors chose to close 180,574 companies, or 48.6 per cent, by applying for voluntary strike-off. Liquidation accounted for the remaining 16,426, or 4.4 per cent.
Compulsory strike-off usually follows missed paperwork. The Registrar may act where it believes a company is not carrying on business, and Companies House guidance cites not receiving documents the company should have sent, such as its confirmation statement or accounts.
The guidance says the Registrar will try to contact a company to ask whether it is still trading before striking it off.
For the full year to 31 March 2026, 787,120 companies were dissolved, up 8.3 per cent on the year before. Incorporations over the same period were 815,277, up 1.67 per cent, and the register stood at 5,479,045 companies at the end of March.
Dissolution is not insolvency. Trade body R3 counted 28,616 UK corporate insolvencies in 2025.
The money matters more than the paperwork. Anything a company still owns when it is dissolved, including cash in its bank account, passes to the Crown as ownerless property.
The Bona Vacantia Division of the Government Legal Department received £129m from dissolved companies in England and Wales in the year to March 2026. That is up 24 per cent from £104m the year before.
GOV.UK guidance on closing a company puts it bluntly: "Anything that's left will go to the Crown." It adds that this covers money arriving after dissolution, including HMRC refunds.
Most of the cases are small. The Crown's Nominee accounts show 100,668 low-value cases, each involving assets under £300, were processed in 2025-26, against 69,619 the year before. The accounts say financial institutions referred these in bulk after outreach work.
Some of it goes back. £35m was paid to directors and shareholders of companies restored to the register in 2025-26, down from £37m.
Doing it voluntarily carries its own obligations. Directors applying for strike-off must send a copy of the application within seven days to shareholders, creditors, employees, managers, trustees of any employee pension fund, and any director who did not sign the form.
Failing to do so is an offence carrying a potentially unlimited fine on summary conviction, according to Companies House guidance. Where the omission is meant to conceal the application, the maximum penalty is seven years in prison.
The practical order is unglamorous and matters: pay final bills, take the final distribution, close the bank account, then apply. A founder who lets a dormant company drift instead picks up filing penalties and leaves whatever is in the account to the Treasury.