UK Business Exit Statistics 2026: Sale Rates, Succession & Exit Data

The completion rate problem

The most cited figure in UK business sales is this: roughly 80% of SMEs that try to sell fail to find a buyer.

That number has been consistent for years. Over 90% of small businesses that go to market never complete a sale. Business brokers, the traditional route to market, sell approximately 20% of the businesses they take on, and even that figure is generous. It includes mid-cap transactions where completion rates are significantly higher. For businesses with turnover under £1 million, the effective success rate is far worse.

Yet the "failure to sell" figure only captures businesses that actively tried. It says nothing about the far larger group that never reached the market at all.

Companies House dissolved 787,120 companies in the year to March 2026 (April 2025 to March 2026), an 8.31% increase on the prior year. In the same period there were 35,318 liquidations and other insolvency proceedings, down 11.35%. Not all of these were trading businesses, and not all closures represent failed exits. But the scale is instructive: hundreds of thousands of companies leave the register every year, and only a tiny fraction pass through a structured sale process first.

The average dissolved or closed company was 4.93 years old, a figure that has hovered around five years since 2016/17, so many were never established enough to sell. But within the population of long-established, asset-backed businesses with ageing owners, the picture is different. These companies don't dissolve because they failed. They dissolve because nobody planned for what came next. For company-level analysis, see our study of the 901 profitable UK businesses their owners chose to close in the past year.

Who owns UK businesses

We analysed 3.7 million active UK companies using public data from Companies House. The ownership demographics point to a structural transition that is already underway.

52.8% of UK companies have an average director age of 50 or above, which is 1,889,051 companies. 23.8% have an average director age of 60 or above (852,756 companies). 5.9% have an average director age of 70 or above (212,848 companies). These shares are computed over the 3.6 million active companies with a director age on file, not over the 3.8 million active register.

McKinsey's Institute for Economic Mobility found that one in four American small-business owners is now 65 or older. That is a different measurement from ours (individual owners by age, against companies by average board age), so the two figures sitting close together is a coincidence rather than a match. We break down the UK-US comparison in detail in our UK analysis of the Great Ownership Transfer.

But the UK has an additional structural vulnerability: the single-director company. Of the 3.6 million active UK companies for which we hold a director count, 2,154,332 (60.2%) have just one director. No co-directors. No named successors. No family members on the board. No internal succession infrastructure of any kind.

This is not a behavioural failure. It is a structural one. Nearly two-thirds of UK companies are constitutionally incapable of an internal succession because there is nobody else in the business with legal authority.

The founder-operator pattern is deeply embedded. 298,262 companies have a single director with 15 or more years of continuous tenure: one individual running the business alone for over a decade with no sign of transition planning.

The succession infrastructure gap

When we filter the database to its most acute cohort (sole directors aged 60 or above, total assets above £50,000, and no internal successor), the numbers are stark.

173,807 companies meet all three criteria. They hold £198.9 billion in aggregate assets. These are not marginal businesses. They are established, asset-backed companies with a single point of failure: one person, approaching or past retirement age, with no plan and no successor. For a deeper look at why this matters, see our UK SME Succession Crisis analysis.

Within that group, 120,515 companies have a sole director in their 70s, collectively holding £57.6 billion in assets. For these businesses, succession is not a five-year conversation. It is happening now, whether the owner has planned for it or not.

Widening the lens to sole directors aged 60+ with any positive assets produces 365,964 companies. Within that group, tens of thousands also have 15+ years of director tenure, the classic founder-operator profile where one individual holds all relationships, institutional knowledge, and operational authority.

These are the businesses most likely to close rather than transfer. Not because they lack value, but because no infrastructure exists to connect them with buyers before the window closes.

Our UK Business Succession Index breaks succession exposure down by trade and by region: precision engineering in the West Midlands, for instance, or pharmacies in Yorkshire and the Humber.

The five exit routes

UK business owners have five main exit routes. None works well for the majority of small SMEs.

The broker bottleneck

Business brokers are the traditional intermediary, but the economics are strained.

There are over 1,000 firms in the UK that sell businesses. The industry is unregulated, unlicensed, and highly variable in quality. Completion rates across the industry sit around 20%, and that figure flatters the larger corporate finance houses. For small business brokers handling sub-£1 million transactions, the effective success rate is lower.

Several structural problems contribute.

Misaligned incentives. Many brokers take on businesses they know will be difficult to sell, collecting upfront listing fees or retainers while doing minimal active marketing. Some firms carry 15–20 mandates simultaneously without completing a single transaction in over a year.

Valuation inflation. Unrealistic seller expectations are consistently cited as the single biggest barrier to completion. Over half of failed sales are attributed to this factor. Yet brokers frequently inflate valuations to win mandates, creating a disconnect between expectation and market reality that only becomes apparent months into the process.

Confidentiality failure. Maintaining discretion during a sale is critical, because employees, customers, and suppliers can react badly to news that a business is on the market. Yet confidentiality is routinely breached through careless marketing, identifiable listing descriptions, or simply disclosing the company name in correspondence.

Volume over specialisation. Most brokers take on businesses across all sectors and sizes. This generalist approach means individual businesses receive limited attention, and the broker lacks the sector expertise to identify the right buyer pool.

For brokers looking to build pipeline from this data, see our guide to data-led mandate sourcing.

The hidden market

The broker model only captures businesses where the owner has consciously decided to sell, engaged an intermediary, and entered the market. This represents a small fraction of the total exit pipeline.

The far larger opportunity sits in businesses showing clear succession signals but not yet listed. McKinsey calls this the "missing middle", and our data quantifies it at company level. We explored this concept in depth in our UK analysis of the Great Ownership Transfer.

When we score UK companies for exit readiness (combining director age, tenure, filing patterns, investment behaviour, dividend activity, and board structure) and keep only those that are also genuinely good businesses, we find 21,385 PURSUE-grade companies. For the full methodology behind these scores, see How We Identify Exit-Ready UK Businesses.

These are viable, often profitable businesses. The sectors where they cluster are not distressed industries. They are the productive core of the UK economy.

Among the sectors we track in detail, Construction has the largest PURSUE pipeline: 3,323 companies where a real business meets strong exit signals, drawn from a total population of 395,405. B2B services has 2,287 from 539,082. Manufacturing has 2,266 from 145,419, and stands out on two other measures: the longest average director tenure of the headline sectors (10.1 years vs the 8.4-year national baseline) and among the highest median assets (£92,069 vs £45,403 nationally), making it the sector where individual targets tend to be most financially substantial. Healthcare has 2,008 from 194,240.

Each sector has its own page: exit-ready manufacturing businesses, construction and trades firms, professional services firms and healthcare businesses.

A broader "ideal target" count (companies with a single director aged 60–70, tenure of 15+ years, and assets above £50,000) captures the pre-market vendors a searcher might approach before they list. B2B services: 8,233. Construction: 7,642. Manufacturing: 3,567. Tech services: 831. Healthcare: 2,189. Education: 587.

Beyond these headline sectors, ExitRadar publishes detailed exit-trend analyses for IT services, transport & logistics, wholesale & distribution, automotive, food & beverage manufacturing, and facility services, each with sector-specific demographic, financial, and succession-signal benchmarks.

PURSUE-grade companies are not evenly distributed. London and the South East consistently produce the highest counts across every sector. But rates (the share of a region's companies that are PURSUE-grade) tell a different story: the densest regions by rate aren't always the largest by count, and several rural and northern regions punch above their weight per capita.

These regional patterns matter for buyers. A searcher targeting a specific sector in a less-worked region often finds materially less competition per viable target than in London. Our Regional Map of Succession Opportunity breaks down the PURSUE pipeline by region, showing where buyers should focus.

These businesses are not listed on any marketplace. Most of their owners have not consciously decided to sell. But the data shows they match every profile of a company approaching a natural exit window. The owner is ageing. Investment has slowed. Filing engagement is declining. No successor is in place.

The gap is not a shortage of businesses or a shortage of buyers. It is a shortage of infrastructure to connect them.

The tax clock

Tax policy is compounding the demographic pressure.

Business Asset Disposal Relief (BADR), formerly Entrepreneurs' Relief, provides a reduced CGT rate on qualifying business disposals, up to a lifetime limit of £1 million. The rate has risen sharply: 10% before April 2025, 14% for the 2025/26 tax year, and 18% from 6 April 2026. For the full impact analysis, see our BADR Rate Rise breakdown.

For a business owner selling £1 million of qualifying gains, the difference between the old 10% rate and the incoming 18% rate is £80,000 in additional tax. For a £2 million exit (£1 million qualifying for BADR, the remainder taxed at the main CGT rate), the total bill rises from £300,000 two years ago, when BADR was 10% and the main rate 20%, to £420,000 from April 2026. That is £120,000 more, on the same sale. Two separate changes are compounding here. BADR itself nearly doubled, costing £80,000 on the first £1 million. The main CGT rate rose from 20% to 24% at the same time, costing a further £40,000 on the second. And because the BADR lifetime limit is fixed at £1 million, the relief covers a shrinking share of the gain as the business gets bigger: on a £5 million exit the same two changes add £240,000, of which the main-rate rise, not BADR, accounts for two thirds.

The direction of travel is clear. Some commentators expect further increases. Owners who delay exit face progressively higher tax costs, which creates urgency for those who are already approaching natural retirement age.

Inheritance tax changes add further pressure. From April 2026, Business Property Relief and Agricultural Property Relief are capped, meaning more business assets fall within the inheritance tax net. Owners who intended to pass businesses to family members through their estate now face a materially worse tax outcome than even twelve months ago.

The combined effect of rising CGT on disposal and reduced IHT relief on retention narrows the window for tax-efficient exits from both directions.

The demographic pipeline

The succession pressure visible today is the leading edge of a much larger wave.

The 50–60 age bracket in our database contains 1,036,295 companies, more than a million businesses whose directors will age into the 60+ cohort over the next decade. Behind them, 1,019,696 companies sit in the 40–50 bracket. The pipeline of future succession pressure extends decades into the future.

At the sharp end, the numbers are more immediate. The 852,756 companies with an average director age of 60+ today will not all exit within five years. But a significant proportion will. Health events, retirement decisions, tax pressure, and simple fatigue will push tens of thousands of owners toward exit, ready or not.

Among those with the clearest exit signals (sole directors in their 70s with established businesses and no internal successor), the transition is already happening. The question is whether it happens through an orderly transfer that preserves jobs and value, or through a quiet closure that destroys both.

What this means for buyers

For search fund operators, ETA practitioners, and strategic acquirers, the UK exit pipeline represents a large and growing opportunity, but one that requires a fundamentally different approach to deal sourcing. We mapped the full UK ETA Ecosystem: investors, lenders, advisers, and the 21,385 PURSUE-grade targets they are all competing for.

The businesses most likely to be available are not listed on any marketplace. They are identified through data, not deal flow. The owners are receptive to the right conversation but hostile to transactional approaches. The competitive dynamics are different from brokered deals: fewer buyers competing, but higher barriers to making initial contact.

Our scoring model identifies 21,385 PURSUE-grade companies, where a strong business meets strong exit signals. Across every sector we score, the largest PURSUE pipelines are in construction, B2B services and hospitality. Of the four sectors that fit typical search fund and ETA acquisition criteria best, construction carries the most PURSUE-grade companies, followed by B2B services, manufacturing and healthcare.

The sector totals above are cut by industry code, which is where a specialist trade can disappear: cooling and refrigeration has no code of its own and is filed inside plumbing. The Cold Trade finds those companies by name instead and takes one trade apart in full: profits, workforce, ownership, owner age and what is actually buyable.

The opportunity is large. The infrastructure to access it is what has been missing.

Sources and methodology

This analysis draws on three categories of data.

ExitRadar's proprietary database covers 3.7 million active UK companies, derived from Companies House bulk data products (company profiles, officer appointments, accounts filings, PSC data) published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Director ages are based on month/year of birth as filed at Companies House. Financial figures are drawn from the most recently filed accounts. Exit readiness scores are generated by ExitRadar's scoring model, which combines director demographics, filing behaviour, investment patterns, and financial health into a composite measure of succession timing and business quality. Full methodology: How We Identify Exit-Ready UK Businesses.

Companies House official statistics provide register-level data on incorporations, dissolutions, and insolvency proceedings. Dissolution and insolvency figures cited are from Companies register activities: statistical release April 2025 to March 2026 (published 25 June 2026) and Company insolvency statistics December 2025 (published January 2026).

Published research includes the McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility report "The Great Ownership Transfer" (February 2026), Federation of Small Businesses survey data on exit planning, and industry research on broker completion rates and seller confidence. All sources are cited in context.

Enterprise value, which includes earnings multiples and goodwill, would be significantly higher than the balance sheet figures cited in this article. Net asset figures from filed accounts represent a floor, not a ceiling, on business value.

This article is updated regularly as new data becomes available. Figures last refreshed September 2026.

About ExitRadar: ExitRadar analyses public UK company data to identify businesses showing succession and exit signals 2–5 years before they reach brokers. Our intelligence briefs provide pre-approach analysis for search fund operators, business brokers, and prospective acquirers. Browse exit-ready companies by sector at exitradar.co.uk/sectors, or see what a full intelligence brief includes with our permanently free sample report.