Construction insolvency by trade: which trades go bust most often in Great Britain (12 months to August 2026)

By trade: the SIC classes

Every Section F class, highest rate first. A row with fewer than 20 insolvencies is flagged: its rate can move a long way on a handful of cases, so read its interval. The class rows sum to 4,030, not the 4,050 above, because 20 compulsory liquidations in England and Wales are recorded under Section F with no class.

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By the trade the company name declares

UK SIC 2007 has no class for bricklaying, groundworks, drylining or steel erection, so, as the census does, the companies are also grouped by the trade their name declares, such as BRICKWORK, GROUNDWORK or SCAFFOLD, on both sides of the rate: insolvent companies and active companies whose first SIC code is in Section F. A name says what a company called itself, not what it does now. Among trades with at least 20 insolvencies, bricklaying and masonry (11.8) and glazing and windows (11.7) are highest and painting and decorating (4.5) lowest.

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Method, and the limits of the data

• Insolvencies. The record-level file for England, Wales and Scotland behind Insolvency Service, Company Insolvency Statistics: August 2026, published 18 September 2026, for the 12 months September 2025 to August 2026. The file is filtered the way the Insolvency Service filters its own industry tables (not bulk, not administrations moving to a creditors’ voluntary liquidation, not moratoriums), which reproduces its published Tables 1c and 4b exactly.
• Great Britain only. Record-level data for Northern Ireland is not available, so every rate is for England, Wales and Scotland, split by company number prefix.
• Active companies. Companies with the status Active on the Companies House Free Company Data Product snapshot of 1 October 2026, counted by their first-listed SIC code, the same primary code the insolvency records use.
• A flow against a stock. Insolvencies over 12 months are divided by the companies active on one day, 1 October 2026, a month after the period ends, so the rate is an approximation to the share of companies that failed in the year.
• Primary SIC is the lowest-numbered code. The register stores a company’s codes in numeric order and the first is taken as primary, so a company listing a group 41 code beside a trade code counts under the group 41 code. The Insolvency Service notes that SIC detail is less reliable at five digits.
• The unclassified cases. 20 compulsory liquidations in England and Wales are recorded under Section F with no class. They are in the published totals and in no class row.
• Intervals. Each 95% interval treats the count of insolvencies as Poisson and uses Byar’s approximation. Where the count is small the interval is wide, and the row is flagged.
• A check on the method. Computed the same way, the all-company rate is 49.5 per 10,000 for England and Wales against the published Table 3 figure of 50.1, and 47.8 against 48.5 for Scotland.
• The counts. The active companies are counted from the register as in UK construction companies in 2026: a count from the Companies House register, here from the 1 October 2026 snapshot and by first-listed SIC code only.