UK Motor Vehicle Repair Insolvency Statistics

There were 140 insolvencies from January to June 2026 against 150 in the same months of 2025, down 6.7%. The rolling 12-month total was 283 against 282 a year earlier, essentially unchanged.

The motor trade as a whole fell 4.3% over the same months. These are Company Debt calculations from Insolvency Service Table A1b data.

The two measures that used to conflict sharply are now much closer together. The rolling 12 months still contains the second half of 2025, which made that year the worst on record at 293.

The year-to-date measure, covering only 2026, shows a real improvement that is only just starting to reach the rolling figure.

The monthly path says something similar in cruder terms: 15, 23, 24, 32, 19, 27. April’s 32 was a genuine outlier; June’s 27 sits back near the middle of that range.

SIC division 45 is usually described as the motor trade, but it bundles together the garage fixing a ten-year-old car with the forecourt selling a new one. Different customers, different margins, different working capital. This page counts the garage.

Split out, both halves of the motor trade eased by a similar amount in 2026: repair down 6.7%, vehicle sales down 6.2%. Neither is diverging sharply from the other any more.

The wider retail sector, meanwhile, fell 14.3%, well over twice as fast as either half of the motor trade. Whatever is lifting retail is not reaching the workshop, or the forecourt, at the same rate.

Garages had a quiet decade before this. Insolvencies ran between 164 and 195 from 2016 to 2019, then fell to 132 in 2020 and 145 in 2021, when government support and the restrictions on creditors held the normal cycle in check. People also stopped driving, which for once cut both ways: less wear, but also less work.

The recovery brought the reckoning. 236 in 2022 and 274 in 2023, then a dip to 251 in 2024 that looked, at the time, like the worst being over.

It was not. 2025 came in at 293, the highest in the series and 79% above the 164 recorded in 2019. That is the part worth sitting with: the peak for garages is not 2023, as it is in much of the economy. It is last year.

In the garage cases we handle, the money is nearly always stuck in the workshop rather than missing from it. There is a car on the ramp in pieces, the customer is not answering the phone about the extra work, and the part that was ordered for it is already paid for. Multiply that by the number of bays and you have the whole problem.

By the time a director calls us, the parts account is usually the thing that broke first. The factor puts you on stop, so you cannot finish the jobs, so you cannot invoice, so you cannot pay the factor. That loop closes fast, and it is why a garage can go from busy to finished inside a month while the order book still looks healthy.

There is often a personal guarantee on the unit or the parts account, and it is rarely the first thing mentioned on the call. It is usually the thing that has been keeping someone awake. Worth saying plainly: it does not improve by being left, and there is more room to deal with it early than late.

We would not start with the number of jobs. We would look at cash actually collected against the wage bill, how much is sitting in unbilled work in progress and cars you cannot release.

What the parts factor is owed and whether you are on stop, what the premises commit you to, and what is owed to HMRC on VAT and PAYE. Those tell you where the garage really is.

Creditors’ voluntary liquidations account for 88.7% of garage insolvencies, 260 of 293 in 2025, the highest share of any sector on these pages. That is what an asset-light trade looks like on the way out: when a garage stops, there is usually nothing to rescue beyond some tools and a lease, so the directors close it themselves.

Administrations make the same point from the other side, falling from 17 in 2024 to 7 in 2025, just 2.4% of cases. Administration needs a buyer, and most independent garages are worth more as a going concern to their own owner than to anybody else.

Compulsory liquidations doubled, from 12 to 24. A creditor, usually HMRC, petitioning to wind the company up is the one column that rose in share as well as number.

SIC group 452 covers companies whose recorded primary business is the maintenance and repair of motor vehicles: independent garages, workshops, MOT centres, bodyshops and tyre and exhaust fitters.

Selling vehicles (SIC 451) and parts and accessories (SIC 453) are separate codes and are not counted here, even though many real businesses do more than one of those things.

The SIC code records a company’s main recorded activity, not a clean split of its work. A garage that also sells a few cars off the forecourt appears once, under whichever code it registered.

These are company counts, not the number of sites, ramps or technicians affected. One insolvent company may run several branches, and a garage 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 garages, so they cannot be read as the chance of any given garage failing.

The SIC 452 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 garage is viable. Sector totals never do. The questions that matter are narrower: does the labour rate cover the technician once National Insurance is on top, how much cash is trapped in jobs you cannot finish or release, and is the parts account current or on stop?

Plenty of garages in difficulty are sound businesses with a working capital problem or an old VAT bill, and that is worth knowing, because both can be dealt with.

It is more serious when the arrears have grown across several quarters, or when you are turning work away because you cannot buy the parts to do it. That is the point at which a garage is winding itself down, whether anyone has said so out loud or not.

If you are reading this with a stop on the parts account and a VAT bill due, the useful thing to know is that the earlier you speak to someone, the more room there is to move: terms 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 on these figures creditors’ voluntary liquidation is where the overwhelming majority of garages end up. Our insolvency advice for directors is the place to start if you want to understand the options first.