UK Creative, Arts and Entertainment Insolvency Statistics

There were 68 creative, arts and entertainment insolvencies between January and June 2026, against 58 in the same six months of 2025, a rise of 17.2%. Arts, entertainment and recreation as a whole rose a slower 2.3% over the same months.

This trade, at 28% of the section, is rising more than seven times as fast as the section around it. These are Company Debt calculations from Insolvency Service Table A1b data.

The rolling 12-month figure confirms the acceleration. At 139 cases for the year to June 2026 against 121 for the year to June 2025, insolvencies rose 14.9%, against a 7.6% rise for the section overall.

Whatever is unsettled elsewhere in arts, entertainment and recreation, creative and performing arts businesses are the trade feeling it hardest right now.

Sports clubs and facilities, the largest trade in this section, rose a comparatively modest 6.7% year to date. Amusement and recreation activities, covering theme parks and arcades, actually fell 16.7% over the same months.

Creative, arts and entertainment sits well above both, and well above the section’s own 2.3% rise.

That gap matters because creative and performing arts is not a small trade inside this section, it is the second-largest, at 28% of the total. A trade this size rising several times faster than its neighbours is not noise.

The distinctive pressures on live music, theatre and performing arts venues, set out below, are not shared in the same way by a sports centre or a theme park, which helps explain why this trade is moving so differently from the rest of its own section.

Creative, arts and entertainment insolvencies held broadly flat before the pandemic, 56 in 2016 rising to 78 by 2019. 2020 brought only a modest fall, to 71, smaller than in many trades, likely reflecting how many performing-arts businesses and venues went dormant or relied on furlough and cultural-recovery grants rather than trading through repeated closures at reduced capacity.

The rise from there was sharp and has not really stopped. 98 in 2021, 119 in 2022, 144 in 2023, the series peak. 2024 eased to 123, but 2025 climbed back to 129, and 2026 has opened well above even that pace.

Five years on from the pandemic, this trade is running at well over half again its pre-pandemic level, and shows no settled pattern of coming back down the way some other trades on this site have.

In the creative and performing arts cases we see, the business is often smaller and more exposed than it looks from the outside, a single venue, a small promotions company, a production outfit with almost no reserves between one show and the next.

Fixed costs dominate in a way that ticket sales cannot easily offset. Rent, business rates and staffing are committed months ahead of a show, while the revenue depends on how many tickets sell in the days before it, so a run of quieter bookings can turn a venue insolvent even while its long-term audience is unchanged.

PAYE and VAT arrears tend to build during exactly that mismatch, particularly around a rates revaluation or a lease renewal, where the fixed-cost jump lands before the business has had time to adjust pricing or programming around it.

We would not start with the box office. We would look at the fixed-cost base against realistic average attendance, whether a rates revaluation or lease event is imminent, how exposed the business is to a single promoter or touring relationship, and what is owed to HMRC.

A venue or company with a genuine local following usually has more options than the fixed-cost pressure suggests, a renegotiated lease, a restructured booking model, or support accessed early, provided the conversation starts before a creditor forces the timing.

SIC group 900 covers companies whose recorded primary business is creative, arts and entertainment activities: performing arts, support activities for performing arts, artistic creation, and the operation of arts facilities such as theatres and concert venues.

It sits within arts, entertainment and recreation, alongside sports activities and amusement and recreation activities, recorded separately.

This is the second-largest trade in its section, at 28% of arts, entertainment and recreation insolvencies, and it is rising several times faster than the section average, so its own trajectory increasingly shapes the section total.

These are company counts, not the number of venues, performers or productions affected. A single insolvent company may operate one venue or several, and many performers and small production companies trade as sole traders rather than through a company at all, so this page does not capture the whole of the sector’s distress.

The figures are insolvency volumes, not a failure rate. They are not adjusted for the number of active creative and arts businesses, so a rising count does not, on its own, prove a rising rate of failure.

The SIC 900 figures come from Table A1b and are not seasonally adjusted. The latest month is provisional and can be revised.

None of the figures above decide whether a particular venue or company is viable. What matters is narrower: whether the fixed-cost base is covered at realistic attendance, what a pending rates revaluation or lease event will cost, and what is genuinely owed to HMRC.

Plenty of creative and arts businesses in difficulty are artistically sound operations carrying a rates shock or a quiet-booking-run cash gap, and both are usually fixable if addressed early.

If you are reading this with a wage run or a rates payment coming and the takings are not there, the thing worth knowing is that the earlier you speak to someone, the more room there is to move: a lease renegotiated, an HMRC Time to Pay arrangement, or a rescue procedure such as a Company Voluntary Arrangement or administration.

Once a winding-up petition is advertised, the bank account is usually frozen within days, and at that point creditors’ voluntary liquidation may be the only route still open. If you want to talk it through first, our insolvency advice for directors is the place to start.