UK Business Finance Monitor
Secured borrowing by UK companies
UK limited companies registered 217,119 new secured charges in 2025, up 21.2% on the previous year, taken out by 126,198 separate companies. That is 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 2025
217,119
up 21.2% year on year
Companies borrowing
126,198
distinct companies registering a charge
Prior year
179,080
2024 comparison
New secured charges by month
| Year | New charges | Companies | Year on year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 217,119 | 126,198 | +21.2% |
| 2024 | 179,080 | 105,572 | +22.9% |
| 2023 | 145,685 | 86,290 | -7.9% |
| 2022 | 158,180 | 92,188 | +11.3% |
| 2021 | 142,145 | 83,604 | +33% |
| 2020 | 106,894 | 67,294 | -9.3% |
| 2019 | 117,843 | 67,546 | +12.9% |
| 2018 | 104,333 | 59,447 | +12.5% |
| 2017 | 92,746 | 52,677 | +16.2% |
| 2016 | 79,810 | 45,378 | +13.9% |
| 2015 | 70,091 | 40,024 | 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.
One known gap: filings dated June 2026 are under-recorded in this series because of an ingestion outage at our end, not a change in borrowing. That month should not be read as a decline, and it is being backfilled from Companies House.
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 217,119 new charges. Updated monthly.
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