UK Business Finance Monitor
Secured borrowing by UK companies
From January to August 2026, UK limited companies registered 161,266 new secured charges, up 16.9% on the same months of 2025. Across the whole of 2025 they registered 219,174, taken out by 126,411 separate companies, the highest annual total since at least 2015. A charge is the security a lender registers when it lends against a company's assets, so counting them measures how often UK companies actually borrow on security, rather than what a survey says they intend to do.
New charges, Jan to Aug 2026
161,266
up 16.9% on the same months of 2025
New charges, all of 2025
219,174
up 20.3% on 2024
Companies borrowing, 2025
126,411
distinct companies registering a charge
New secured charges by month
| Year | New charges | Companies | Year on year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 219,174 | 126,411 | +20.3% |
| 2024 | 182,186 | 105,873 | +21.9% |
| 2023 | 149,415 | 86,569 | -8% |
| 2022 | 162,321 | 92,484 | +11.1% |
| 2021 | 146,137 | 83,952 | +33% |
| 2020 | 109,860 | 67,639 | -10% |
| 2019 | 122,112 | 67,915 | +12% |
| 2018 | 109,051 | 59,813 | +12% |
| 2017 | 97,351 | 53,040 | +16.5% |
| 2016 | 83,531 | 45,702 | -7.4% |
| 2015 | 90,231 | 40,341 | n/a |
Companies House allows 21 days to deliver a charge, so the most recent weeks are always incomplete and appear on the chart to the right of the dashed marker. They are excluded from every figure quoted above, because an unsettled period reads as a fall in lending when it is only a fall in paperwork that has arrived so far.
Why this exists
Most published figures on UK business lending come from bank-association aggregates or opinion surveys, which are lagged, partial, and describe intention as often as action. Charges tell you what actually happened: a lender registered security, on a dated filing, against a named company. The register is complete, it is public, and it goes back decades. This Monitor is that register, counted.
Source: charges registered at Companies House, compiled by CoreFi. Figures count charge filings, not amounts lent, because a charge document rarely states a reliable sum. Peak year in the series: 2025 with 219,174 new charges. Updated monthly.
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