The UK Overdue Accounts Index 2026.
An analysis of the complete Companies House register, all 5.17 million active UK companies, showing who files their accounts late, and who files on time. The headline is the first-deadline cliff: companies that have just passed their first accounts deadline are late at around seven times the rate of established firms.
- 78,280
- active companies had overdue accounts on 1 June 20261.57%, about 1 in 64
- 10.42%
- of companies aged 21 to 24 months, just past their first accounts deadline, are lateabout 1 in 10, against 1.42% of firms over ten years old
- 305,178
- are overdue on their confirmation statement5.99%, about 1 in 17 (242,006, or 4.88%, among ordinary limited companies)
The first-deadline cliff
Companies that have just passed their first accounts deadline are late at around seven times the rate of established firms: 10.42% of those aged 21 to 24 months, against 1.42% of companies over ten years old. A private company’s first accounts fall due 21 months after incorporation, so the jump comes at that point, and the rate settles back down for every age band after. Across the whole 18 to 24 month band the rate is 4.91%.
| Company age | Accounts overdue |
|---|---|
| 0 to 12 monthsfirst accounts not yet due | 0.00% |
| 12 to 18 months | 0.01% |
| 18 to 21 monthsfirst accounts not yet due | 0.07% |
| 21 to 24 monthsfirst accounts deadline passed | 10.42% |
| 2 to 3 years | 2.83% |
| 3 to 5 years | 2.04% |
| 5 to 10 years | 1.87% |
| 10+ years | 1.42% |
The late-filing league table
Overdue rates by postcode area (areas with at least 5,000 registered companies). The City of London and North London top the table, with Glasgow fourth. Companies registered at Companies House’s own default-address PO boxes are left out, because they are not located there; with them removed, Cardiff’s rate is 1.58%.
| Rank | Postcode area | Overdue rate |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | EC , City of London | 2.02% |
| 2 | N , North London | 2.01% |
| 3 | WC , Central London | 1.98% |
| 4 | G , Glasgow | 1.96% |
| 5 | BT , Belfast / NI | 1.87% |
| 6 | SE , South East London | 1.87% |
| 7 | W , West London | 1.83% |
| 8 | ML , Motherwell | 1.83% |
| 9 | SW , South West London | 1.82% |
| 10 | M , Manchester | 1.79% |
| 11 | DA , Dartford | 1.79% |
| 12 | NW , North West London | 1.78% |
By nation
- London1.90%
- Northern Ireland1.87%
- Scotland1.64%
- Wales1.49%
- Rest of England1.43%
By sector
Water & waste and hospitality are the least reliable filers; agriculture, real estate, finance and health the most. The four sectors with the highest and lowest overdue rates (the full ranking is in the CSV):
| Highest overdue rate | Overdue rate |
|---|---|
| Water & waste | 2.37% |
| Hospitality | 2.09% |
| Education | 2.03% |
| Manufacturing | 1.80% |
| Lowest overdue rate | Overdue rate |
|---|---|
| Health & social care | 1.31% |
| Finance & insurance | 1.31% |
| Real estate | 1.21% |
| Agriculture | 1.17% |
“The standout figure is the first-deadline cliff. About one in ten companies that have just passed their first accounts deadline are late with them, against about one in seventy established firms. It is almost always a knowledge gap, not negligence: founders assume the first accounts work like the second, but a company’s first accounts are due 21 months after incorporation and cover a longer-than-usual first period, so the deadline arrives sooner and bigger than people expect. The fix is simple but has to be early: diarise the first-accounts date the day you incorporate, and get the bookkeeping going from month one rather than month eighteen.
What late filing costs
- £150Up to 1 month late
- £3751 to 3 months late
- £7503 to 6 months late
- £1,500More than 6 months late
Penalties are doubled if accounts are filed late in two successive financial years. (Source: gov.uk, checked 1 October 2026.)
Methodology
- Source
- Companies House Free Company Data Product, BasicCompanyDataAsOneFile-2026-06-01 (the complete, openly published UK register).
- Population
- 5,698,274 companies, of which 5,171,736 are active and 5,000,302 have an accounts due date.
- "Overdue" definition
- An active company whose next accounts due date was before 1 June 2026, the date of the file (Companies House advances the due date once accounts are filed, so a past date on an active company indicates an outstanding filing). The same test, at the same date, is applied to the confirmation statement due date. Until 1 October 2026 this page counted deadlines up to 23 June 2026; see the correction above.
- Age, region & sector
- Age = completed calendar months between incorporation date and 1 June 2026. Region = registered-office postcode area; the 4,638 companies at Companies House’s three default-address PO boxes (CF14 8LH, EH7 9HR, BT1 9DY) are left out of the league table and the nations, because they are not located there. League table: postcode areas with at least 5,000 companies. Sector = the SIC 2007 section of the first SIC code listed; sections with at least 10,000 companies, leaving out companies with no SIC code or the dormant code 99999. Reproducible from the same free dataset, and the scripts are available on request.
- Correction
- Corrected 1 October 2026. First published 27 June 2026 with deadlines counted to 23 June 2026 rather than to the 1 June 2026 file date. Every figure on this page has been recalculated, and a second, independently written script reproduces both the original and the corrected figures from the same file.
- Published
- 27 June 2026. Data snapshot: 1 June 2026. Updated quarterly.
New company, or worried about a first-accounts deadline? See how we handle year-end and statutory accounts, filed on time, every time.