901 Profitable UK Businesses Their Owners Chose to Close

Companies House dissolved 787,120 companies in the year to March 2026, 8.3% more than the year before (Companies House). The average dissolved company was under five years old.

That number tells a buyer very little. The useful question is narrower: how many established, profitable businesses did their owners decide to close, while they were still solvent, when a buyer might have paid for them?

We answered it company by company. As of 3 October 2026, we took every company on our register that is closing and earned £50,000 to £5 million EBITDA on its latest accounts, read its Companies House filing history to see how it is closing, and scored its business quality on the same model we apply to every live company.

The answer is at least 901 in the past twelve months.

Most closures are not choices

4,399 companies in our earnings band started closing in the past year. Most of them were not owners deciding to stop.

A compulsory strike-off is Companies House removing a company that has stopped filing accounts or confirmation statements. It is not a decision anyone announced. Insolvency is the business failing. Neither belongs in a count of owners who walked away from something sellable.

Only two routes are owner decisions about a solvent business. In a members' voluntary liquidation, the directors swear the company can pay all its debts, and a liquidator winds it up and returns the cash to the shareholders. In a voluntary strike-off, the directors apply to remove a company that has stopped trading.

We kept those two routes and applied three more filters: the business had to pass our quality bar, be owned by individuals rather than a parent company, and not be a subsidiary. That leaves 901: 543 solvent liquidations and 358 voluntary strike-offs.

What was closed

These were not marginal businesses. Their median EBITDA was £122,000, and together they earned £236m on their latest accounts. 203 earned £250,000 or more and 44 earned more than £1 million. The figures are recent: 87% of the companies had accounts made up to mid-2024 or later.

Professional services lead, which is what you would expect: firms whose value sits in one person's relationships and know-how are the easiest to close and the hardest to hand over. But construction, healthcare, technology and manufacturing businesses are all in the list, and these are the sectors where buy-and-build platforms are most active.

Who closed them

Two different kinds of owner are in this group, and the route they took separates them.

The solvent liquidations look like retirements. 57% have an owner aged 60 or over, and 19% have one aged 70 or over, against 38% and 13% across 124,521 comparable owner-run businesses that are still trading. The companies are established: 69% are more than ten years old, slightly more than the 65% of their trading peers. These are owners at the natural end of a career, taking the business's cash out through the cheapest door available.

The voluntary strike-offs are younger and smaller. 47% have an owner under 50, against 32% of their trading peers, the companies have a median age of 7 years, and 69% have a single director. These look like owners moving on to something else and closing the company behind them.

What both groups share is a thin board. Across all 901, 54% have a single director, against 38% of comparable businesses still trading. Where one person runs the company, there is nobody inside it to hand over to.

Why selling did not happen

The register cannot tell us whether any of these owners tried to sell first, and some solvent liquidations follow a sale of the trade and assets rather than replacing one. But three things make closure the easy default for an owner like this.

Closing is simple and selling is not. A strike-off is a form. A solvent liquidation is a liquidator and a few months. A sale means advisers, a data room, due diligence and, usually, a period working for the buyer.

Tax can treat the two routes alike. Business Asset Disposal Relief applies to qualifying distributions in a solvent liquidation as well as to a share sale, at 14% from April 2025 and 18% from April 2026. An owner can take most of the value as cash without finding anyone to buy the company.

Nobody asked. A profitable £120,000-EBITDA business run by one person is too small for many brokers and invisible to most buyers. If no acquirer approaches the owner before they decide to stop, the decision is made without a sale ever being on the table.

Nationally, solvent liquidations fell 31.9% to 8,569 in the year to March 2026 (Companies House). Even so, 8,569 owners chose to wind up a solvent company in a single year.

What this means for buyers

For buy-and-build platforms and strategic acquirers, these are bolt-ons that have now left the market for good. A £100,000 to £500,000 EBITDA business with an owner of 60-plus and a single director is exactly the add-on a platform needs, and the kind of business that rarely reaches a broker's list. The time to approach the owner is before they file the liquidator's paperwork.

For search fund operators and ETA buyers, the 203 closers earning £250,000 or more are the target profile: established, profitable, owner-run and retiring. A searcher talking to that owner a year earlier would likely have faced little or no competition.

For brokers, these are mandates that never came to market.

The signals that showed in these companies (an older owner, a single director, an established and profitable business, no visible successor) are visible on the register years before the closure. Those are the signals we score across every trading company, so a buyer can find the owners while selling is still an option.

How we measured this

• Population. Every company on our register, as of 3 October 2026, whose Companies House status is a closing status (proposal to strike off, liquidation, administration, dissolved), with EBITDA of £50,000 to £5 million on its latest filed or estimated accounts, in a trading sector (property, non-trading shells, gambling and members' clubs excluded): 5,200 companies.
• Route. Read from each company's Companies House filing history: application to strike off (DS01), compulsory strike-off notice, declaration of solvency (members' voluntary liquidation), creditors' statement of affairs, winding-up order, administrator's appointment. "In the past year" means the filing that started the route (the strike-off application, or the declaration of solvency or liquidator's appointment) is dated on or after 1 October 2025.
• Quality. Each company was re-scored on our current business quality model (version 103) and had to clear the same floor every trading company must clear to be scored at all.
• Owner-run. No corporate person with significant control and not a probable subsidiary, which removes group restructurings.
• Comparison group. 124,521 trading companies in the same sectors and earnings band that pass the same quality floor and the same owner-run filter.
• Owner age is the oldest person with significant control, from the age band Companies House publishes. Single director means exactly one human director in post on 1 October 2025, before any resignations during the closure.
• Limits. Every count is a floor: a company whose closing status has not yet reached our copy of the register is missing. EBITDA comes from the latest accounts, which are filed or, for small companies that file no profit and loss account, estimated. Nothing here shows whether an owner tried to sell first.

This article replaces our April 2026 analysis of the same question. That version counted insolvent companies and companies struck off for not filing alongside owner closures, used an earlier scoring model, and described a dissolution model whose accuracy we could not reproduce. We rebuilt it from the filing record up.

About ExitRadar: ExitRadar analyses public UK company data to identify businesses showing succession and exit signals. Our intelligence briefs give buy-and-build platforms, strategic acquirers, search fund operators and brokers a pre-approach view of owner-run businesses before they reach the market. See a sample report →