UK Cleaning Company Insolvency Statistics

There were 69 insolvencies from January to June 2026 against 74 in the same months of 2025, down 6.8%. Building and landscape services as a whole fell 22.0% over the same period, from 159 to 124.

These are Company Debt calculations from Insolvency Service Table A1b data.

The rolling 12-month total is the one that should give pause. It rose from 155 to 167, up 7.7%. On the year-to-date measure cleaning is easing slightly; on the longer measure it is still getting worse, at a time when its own division is improving sharply.

Because cleaning is lagging so far behind its own division, its share of all building and landscape services insolvencies climbed from 46.5% to 55.6% in a single year.

Cleaning sits in SIC division 81 alongside landscaping and combined facilities support: broadly the same customers, the same tenders, often the same procurement departments. Those neighbours have had a strong year. Cleaning has barely moved.

Landscape services fell 33.3% and facilities support fell 40.9%, while cleaning eased only 6.8%. The obvious question is what cleaning has that the others do not.

The most likely answer is the shape of its cost base: cleaning is the most labour-intensive of the three, with the largest number of part-time, hourly-paid people per pound of turnover.

That matters because the two costs that have moved most since 2024 are the hourly wage floor and the employer National Insurance charged on it. A trade built almost entirely out of hourly people feels both, and feels them first.

The decade before this was unremarkable. Cleaning insolvencies ran between 81 and 111 from 2016 to 2019, then fell to 56 in 2020, the series low, when government support and the restrictions on creditors held the normal cycle in check. Cleaning also had a genuinely good pandemic, for the obvious reason.

Then it nearly doubled and stayed there. 141 in 2022, 171 in 2023, 172 in 2024, 172 in 2025. Three consecutive years within one case of each other, all of them at the top of the series.

That flatness is the whole point. Most sectors spiked in 2023 and have been coming down since. Cleaning went up and simply stopped, at 91% above the 90 recorded in 2019. It is not a crisis. It is a new, worse normal that has now lasted three years.

In the cleaning cases we handle, the wages always get paid. That is the first thing to understand about this trade. The cleaners are paid weekly or fortnightly, often the lowest-paid people in the chain, and no director we have met wants to be the one who does not pay them.

So when money is short, something else gives way, and what gives way is nearly always the VAT and the PAYE.

By the time a director calls us, HMRC arrears are usually a year old and have quietly become the company’s biggest creditor. Nobody decided that. It happened one payroll at a time, each one a small, defensible decision that made complete sense on the day.

The contract book usually looks reassuring right up to the end, which is what makes this one so hard to see from the inside. Turnover is fine. Sites are staffed. Clients are happy. The company is simply losing a few pence an hour across several hundred thousand hours a year, and no single site looks bad enough to notice.

So we would not start with turnover or the number of contracts. We would look at gross margin per site after wages, National Insurance, holiday pay and pension, and at which sites are underwater and by how much.

Then: what is owed to HMRC and how long it has been owed, whether the contracts have indexation clauses anyone has ever actually enforced, and what TUPE liability travels with the staff if a contract moves. Those are the numbers that tell you whether this is fixable.

Creditors’ voluntary liquidations account for 88.4% of the total, 152 of 172 in 2025, up from 146 in 2024. In a trade with no assets and no resale value, closing the company is usually the only mechanism available, and the directors are the ones who have to reach for it.

Administrations are almost non-existent, at 2 cases in both 2024 and 2025. That is worth understanding rather than glossing over: administration exists to rescue a business with something worth buying. A cleaning contractor’s value is its contracts and its people, and both tend to walk to a competitor without anyone paying for them.

Compulsory liquidations actually fell, from 22 to 17. On a flat total that means slightly fewer creditors lost patience and slightly more directors moved first, which is a marginally better way to end up in the same place.

SIC group 812 covers companies whose recorded primary business is cleaning activities: general cleaning of buildings, specialist industrial cleaning, window cleaning, and similar. Domestic cleaning provided through agencies, waste collection and landscaping sit under separate codes and are not counted here.

Cleaning is a small sector by company count, at roughly a dozen insolvencies a month, so single months move on a handful of cases. The year-to-date and 12-month rolling totals are the steadier guide, and on this page they point slightly different ways, which is itself worth noting.

These are company counts, not the number of sites, contracts or cleaners affected. One insolvent contractor may staff dozens of sites, and a cleaning company can stop trading without ever entering a formal insolvency procedure.

The figures are insolvency volumes, not a failure rate. They are not adjusted for the number of active cleaning companies. Barriers to entry are very low in this trade, so the population changes quickly and a flat count does not necessarily mean a flat risk.

The SIC 812 figures come from Table A1b and are not seasonally adjusted. The Insolvency Service seasonally adjusts parts of its headline England and Wales series where it finds seasonality, but that adjustment does not apply to the industry figures used here. The latest month is provisional and can be revised.

None of the figures above decide whether your company is viable. Sector totals never do. The questions that matter are narrower and site by site: after wages, National Insurance, holiday pay and pension, does each contract still make money, and if some do not, can you reprice them or exit them before they take the rest with them?

Plenty of cleaning companies in difficulty are sound businesses carrying two or three contracts that stopped working, and that is worth knowing: a contract can be repriced, renegotiated or handed back.

It is more serious when HMRC arrears have been growing for several quarters, or when the only reason the wages cleared last week is that the VAT did not.

If that last sentence is uncomfortably familiar, the useful thing to know is that the earlier you speak to someone, the more room there is to move: contracts repriced, an HMRC Time to Pay arrangement, or a rescue procedure such as a Company Voluntary Arrangement or administration.

A CVA is worth a serious look in this trade specifically. The contracts are often profitable going forward even when the arrears sitting behind them are not survivable, and that is close to the textbook case for one.

Once HMRC petitions, the bank account is usually frozen within days, the wages do not clear, and the sites are uncovered by the following morning. At that point creditors’ voluntary liquidation is generally what is left. Our insolvency advice for directors is the place to start.