UK Medical and Dental Practice Insolvency Statistics

There were 50 medical and dental practice insolvencies between January and June 2026, against 42 in the same six months of 2025, a rise of 19.0%. Human health and social work activities as a whole rose 12.3%, from 285 to 320.

Medical and dental practices, at 16% of the section, are rising faster than the section around them, though from a small base where a handful of cases moves the percentage a long way. These are Company Debt calculations from Insolvency Service Table A1b data.

The rolling 12-month figure tells a gentler story: 101 cases for the year to June 2026 against 91 for the year to June 2025, up 11.0%, below the section’s 21.8% rise over the same period.

The two measures agree on direction, up, but not on how sharply. Read that as a sign of how noisy a small trade’s numbers can be from one month to the next.

This is one of the few pages on this site where nearly every trade sharing its section is rising, just not at the same pace. Other residential care activities rose 61.5% year to date.

Social work activities without accommodation for the elderly and disabled rose 123.1%, from a very small base. Hospital activities was the one exception, down 15.6%.

Medical and dental practices, up 19.0%, sit above the section average of 12.3% but well below the sharpest rises in the table. Whatever is driving the wider rise in health and social care insolvencies, medical and dental practices are not being spared it.

With figures this small across most trades in the table, read the direction as the signal and the precise percentage as noisy. A section moving broadly upward across four of its five trades is harder to dismiss as random than any single trade’s number would be alone.

Medical and dental practice insolvencies have always been a small, noisy series: 51 in 2016, jumping to 84 in 2017, back to 60 in 2018, 70 in 2019. At this scale, a handful of cases moves the annual figure by double-digit percentages, so the pre-pandemic years are better read as a range, roughly 50 to 85, than a trend.

2020 and 2021 stayed within that range, 61 and 58, before a clearer rise took hold: 75 in 2022, 94 in 2023, 106 in 2024, the series high. 2025 eased slightly to 93, still comfortably the second-highest year on record.

The sharp rise in the first five months of 2026 suggests 2025’s dip was not the start of a new falling trend. Whether the year closes above or below 2024’s peak, the sector is trading at a materially higher level of distress than at any point before 2022.

In the medical and dental practice cases we see, the trigger is usually a funding or contract change rather than a sudden loss of patients. A practice can be fully booked and still be losing money once staff costs and compliance requirements are covered, particularly where NHS-rate work no longer covers its own cost.

Partnership structures add a complication a limited company does not have: when one partner wants to leave or retire and no successor can be found on workable terms, the practice’s viability can come into question for reasons that have nothing to do with clinical demand.

Staff costs are usually the largest fixed commitment, and in a practice they cannot easily flex with a quiet week the way stock or discretionary spending can. HMRC and pension-scheme arrears tend to build during exactly the kind of transition, a contract renegotiation, a partner departure, a move away from NHS work, that these pressures are creating right now.

We would not start with patient numbers. We would look at the mix of NHS and private income and how each is trending, what staff and compliance costs are committed regardless of income, whether a partnership or ownership change is pending, and what is owed to HMRC.

A practice going through a genuine transition, from NHS to mixed or private work, or through a partner change, usually has more options than it feels like from the inside, provided the conversation with an adviser starts before a creditor forces the timing.

SIC group 862 covers companies whose recorded primary business is medical and dental practice activities: general and specialist medical practice and dental practice, whether NHS, private or mixed. Hospitals, other human health activities and social work activities are recorded under separate codes within the same section.

This is a small sector, fewer than 110 insolvencies in any year on record, so month-to-month and even year-to-date figures move sharply on a handful of cases. Read the direction of travel rather than the precision of any single percentage.

These are company counts, not the number of practices, clinicians or patients affected. Many medical and dental practices operate as unincorporated partnerships rather than companies, and are not counted in this figure at all, so this page understates the true scale of distress in the wider primary care sector.

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

The SIC 862 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 practice is viable. What matters is narrower: how the NHS and private income mix is trending, whether staff and compliance costs are covered at current volumes, and what is genuinely owed to HMRC.

Plenty of practices in difficulty are clinically sound businesses carrying a funding-transition gap or a partner departure they have not yet resolved, and that is usually fixable if addressed early.

If you are reading this with a payroll or pension-scheme payment coming and the cash is not there, the thing worth knowing is that the earlier you speak to someone, the more room there is to move: 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.