UK Furniture Manufacturing Insolvency Statistics

There were 75 insolvencies from January to June 2026 against 73 in the same months of 2025, up 2.7%. The rolling 12-month total was 145 against 144 a year earlier, also up slightly.

Manufacturing as a whole fell 8.5% over the same months, from 1,013 to 927. These are Company Debt calculations from Insolvency Service Table A1b data.

Furniture is no longer just standing still, it is drifting the wrong way while the trade around it improves. 2025 closed at 143, 29% above the 111 recorded in 2019.

Furniture’s share of manufacturing insolvencies keeps creeping up, for no better reason than that it isn’t falling with the rest of the trade.

The monthly path is noisy, as it always is in a sector this small. 2026 has run 12, 10, 15, 11, 16, 11. Read any two of those months together and you can tell whichever story you fancy.

The year-to-date and rolling totals are the only measures worth arguing from here.

Manufacturing insolvencies fell 8.5% in the first half of 2026, from 1,013 to 927. Furniture went the other way, up 2.7%.

Wholesale of household goods, a large part of how furniture reaches the shops, fell 18.3%. Household equipment retail rose 5.3%.

Neither of those is a clean furniture series. SIC 464 and SIC 475 both cover textiles, appliances and hardware alongside furniture, the nearest published comparators, not a like-for-like match.

Taken together, the pattern is hard to miss. The people moving furniture around are having a mixed year. The people making it are going backwards.

Furniture insolvencies did not climb steadily into this. They held between 92 and 111 from 2016 to 2019, eased to 102 in 2020, then collapsed to 58 in 2021, when government support and the restrictions on creditors held the normal insolvency cycle in check.

Then the bill arrived. 129 in 2022, and 163 in 2023, the worst year in the series and close to triple the 2021 low. The pandemic did not spare these companies. It postponed them.

What has happened since is the part that matters now. 139 in 2024, 143 in 2025: down 12% from the 2023 peak and then stuck.

Three years past the worst of it, furniture is still running 29% above its last normal year. This is not a sector in freefall. It has levelled off somewhere it cannot afford to sit.

In the furniture cases we handle, the timber is bought and paid for long before the money comes back. You pay for board, foam, fabric and the people who build it, then wait on a retailer’s payment run.

Cash goes out at the front and comes back at the end, and every week in between is funded by you.

By the time a director calls us the order book usually still looks respectable, which is what makes this hard to see from the inside. Terms crept from 30 days to 45 and then to 60.

One retailer became a third of the output without anyone deciding it should. A VAT quarter got paid late once, and never quite caught up.

A personal guarantee is usually in there too, on the invoice finance or the machinery, and it’s rarely the first thing mentioned on the call. It is almost always what’s actually kept them awake.

That guarantee does not get better by being left alone, and the point at which it can still be managed is earlier than most people think.

The version we hear most often happens on a Friday: a big customer’s payment run slips by a week, and the wage run, a timber invoice and a VAT payment all land in the same seven days. Most firms survive that once. The third time finishes them.

We would not start with turnover. We would look at gross margin after materials and labour, how much cash is asleep in timber and work in progress, how long the debtor book actually takes to pay, how much output leaves on one customer’s lorry, and what is owed to HMRC.

Creditors’ voluntary liquidations are the overwhelming majority, at 115 of the 143 insolvencies recorded in 2025. That number was also 115 in 2024, so the directors’ own decision to stop was no more common last year than the year before.

The movement was somewhere else. Compulsory liquidations rose from 9 to 17, close to double, taking them from 6.5% of the total to 11.9%.

A creditor petitioning to wind a company up is what pushed the 2025 total above 2024, and that is a different signal from a director choosing the timing: it means somebody else chose it for them.

Administrations went the other way, from 13 to 9. Administration needs a business worth rescuing and usually assets worth lending against, and on these numbers that combination is getting rarer in furniture rather than more common.

SIC group 310 covers companies whose recorded primary business is manufacturing furniture: household, office, kitchen and shop furniture, and mattresses. Furniture retailers and wholesalers sit under separate codes and are not included, so this page counts the makers, not the sellers.

Furniture manufacturing is a small sector by company count, at roughly a dozen insolvencies a month. Monthly figures move sharply on a handful of cases and should not be read as a trend on their own. The year-to-date and 12-month rolling totals are the steadier guide.

These are company counts, not the number of factories, workers or brands affected. One insolvent company may run several sites or trading names, and a manufacturer 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 furniture manufacturers, so a flat count does not by itself mean a flat risk of failure.

The SIC 310 figures come from Table A1b and are not seasonally adjusted, even though the Insolvency Service does seasonally adjust parts of its headline England and Wales series. The latest month is provisional and can be revised.

None of the figures above decide whether your business is viable. Sector totals never do. The questions that matter are narrower: does the margin still cover the factory once materials and labour are paid?

Can you fund the gap between buying timber and getting paid for what you made from it, and what happens if your largest customer pays 30 days later than promised?

Plenty of furniture manufacturers in difficulty are sound businesses with a working-capital problem or an old HMRC arrears bill, and both are fixable.

It is more serious when the margin no longer covers the overhead at any realistic volume, or when one customer has grown too large to lose and knows it.

If you are reading this with a wage run coming and a payment that has not landed, the thing worth knowing is that the earlier you speak to someone, the more room there is to move: supplier terms renegotiated, the debtor book refinanced, 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 the options narrow to what is left rather than what you would choose. 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.