UK Temporary Staffing Agency Insolvency Statistics

Yes, on the two measures worth trusting. There were 88 insolvencies from January to June 2026 against 82 in the same months of 2025, a rise of 7.3%, and the rolling 12-month total went from 163 to 182, up 11.7%.

The monthly figures are noisier. June’s 16 cases were up from 12 in May, and the run so far this year has gone 13, 7, 24, 16, 12, 16. That is not a steady climb.

The honest reading is a renewed deterioration from a level that was already high: 2025 set a new series peak of 176. These are Company Debt calculations from Insolvency Service Table A1b data.

Temporary staffing rose while everything next to it fell: permanent-placement agencies (SIC 781) down 24.9%, employment activities (SIC 78) down 11.7%, and the broad administrative and support services section (SIC N) down 20.0%.

Temporary staffing accounted for 33.3% of employment-activities insolvencies in the first half of 2026, up from 27.4% a year earlier. Its share of the wider section also rose, from 6.3% to 8.5%.

This is not a rising tide lifting every recruitment failure with it. Whatever is happening is happening to temporary staffing in particular.

Whatever the 2025 peak suggests, this is not a steady decade-long climb. Insolvencies fell from 132 in 2016 to 94 in 2017, then sat between 102 and 111 through 2018 and 2019.

They dropped to 78 in 2020 and 92 in 2021, when government support and the restrictions on creditors held the normal insolvency cycle in check, before returning to 108 in 2022 and 107 in 2023.

The damage is recent. The total jumped to 160 in 2024 and then to 176 in 2025, the highest in the series, 10.0% above 2024 and 58.6% above the 111 recorded in 2019.

In the temporary staffing cases we handle, it almost never starts with a quiet month. It starts with a Friday. The workers get paid, because the workers always get paid, and something else gives way to make that happen: the VAT, the PAYE, the supplier who can wait another fortnight.

By the time a director calls us the pattern is usually months old. Debtor days have crept out, one client has quietly become half the ledger, timesheets are being queried, the funder has trimmed the advance rate, and there is a personal guarantee on the facility that nobody wants to talk about.

The agency looks busy throughout. It has often never been busier. That is exactly what makes this one so hard to see from the inside, and why the call tends to come later than it should.

So we would not start with turnover or worker headcount. We would look at gross margin after on-costs, what the payroll actually needs each week, how concentrated the client book is, how old the debtor book is, what the funder will still advance against, and what is owed to HMRC. Those six numbers tell you more than the sales figures ever will.

SIC group 782, temporary employment agency activities, covers companies whose recorded primary business is supplying workers on a temporary basis. Permanent-placement and executive-search agencies sit under SIC 781, and longer-term human resources provision under SIC 783; both have their own separate figures.

These are company counts, not the number of branches, workers, assignments or client sites affected. One insolvent company may run several offices or trading brands, and an agency 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 temporary staffing companies, so the year-to-date and rolling 12-month comparisons are a better guide than any single month.

The SIC 782 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 agency is viable. Sector totals never do. The questions that matter are much narrower: can you fund Friday, can you meet PAYE and National Insurance when they fall due, and will the debtor book collect quickly enough to keep you inside the facility?

Plenty of agencies in trouble are sound businesses with a timing problem or an old arrears bill, and that is worth knowing, because it is fixable. It is more serious when the margin no longer covers on-costs and overheads, when invoices are being knocked back by the funder, or when one client has grown too big to lose.

If you are reading this with a payroll due and no obvious way to fund it, the thing worth knowing is that the earlier you speak to someone, the more room there is to move: 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 the facility is pulled or a payroll is missed, that room disappears quickly, and creditors’ voluntary liquidation may be the only route left.