Data · Method

How we built the UK company cash dataset

Source and sample

Companies House publishes a monthly archive of the accounts filed with it digitally, free to download. We drew 5,000 filings at random from each of the two archives for June and July 2026, with a fixed seed so the same filings can be drawn again, and kept one set of accounts per company (9,999 companies). Industry codes come from the free BasicCompanyDataAsOneFile-2026-09-01 snapshot. Nothing on these pages comes from any other source.

The check every company passes

A company is used only if three figures in its own accounts agree: current assets, less creditors due within a year, equals the net current assets it filed. Micro-entity accounts may show prepayments as a separate line, which is added to current assets for this check. 6 companies agree only to within £1, which we allow for rounding; every other company agrees to the penny. Where a figure is missing and the check cannot be made, the company is left out rather than estimated.

• 7,710 companies pass, of which 217 filed as dormant and 12 did not say, leaving 7,481 trading companies.
• Left out: 2,096 without the figures needed for the check, 89 whose figures add up only with negative current assets or creditors, 31 whose figures do not add up, 22 not in pounds sterling (tagged, or detected in the printed balance-sheet header; the detection is a text match, not exhaustive), 51 unreadable or without a balance sheet.
• Sign corrections (542 of the trading companies). Some filing software, chiefly Companies House's own online micro-entity form, prints net current liabilities in brackets but records the number as positive. Where the printed accounts show the brackets and current assets less creditors gives exactly the negative of the recorded figure, we use the negative (531 companies). 11 more recorded their creditors with a minus sign in a way that adds up only as a deduction.
• Figures the accounts themselves fix (1,059 of the trading companies). A balance sheet with no creditors-within-a-year line at all, whose current assets equal its net current assets exactly, has no such creditors. A cash or debtors line that does not appear at all is zero only when the other alone equals current assets exactly. Where no current-assets subtotal is tagged, current assets are the cash and debtors tagged, accepted only if the check above then holds to the penny. Nothing else is filled in.
• Spot check. 50 companies (20 drawn at random, 10 sign-corrected, 10 with no creditors line, 10 with no current-assets subtotal) were compared with their accounts on the Companies House website. The tagged figures match the bulk file; net current assets appears among the first amounts after its own label (the second, where the first looks like a note number), with the same sign; current assets, creditors and cash each appear after their own label. The check cannot always tell the current year's column from last year's, does not check debtors, and does not check current assets where no subtotal is tagged. 48 of 50 passed automatically; the other 2 were checked by hand (one company's cash figure is tagged in the filing but not printed on the balance sheet, and equals its printed current assets; one company filed under a name ending '(formerly ...)', with the same company number and figures). This checks that we read the filings faithfully; it cannot check that the filings themselves are right, or that a filer tagged every bank account as cash (some put a second account on an untagged line).

What each figure means

• Net current liabilities: net current assets below zero. All checked trading companies.
• Negative net cash: cash plus debtors, less creditors due within a year, below zero. This is the version of net cash that Companies House accounts allow: cash plus debtors, less creditors due within a year. Debtors are as the company reports them, which is mostly money owed to it but can include prepaid expenses, so for some companies this flatters the position. The net cash in our product also deducts longer-term liabilities, so it is stricter, and a company can be positive here and negative there. It can never be rarer than net current liabilities for the same company.
• Cash figures (less cash than creditors, £1,000 or less, median cash, median cash as a share of creditors) use only non-micro accounts (small-company, FRS 102 and larger; micro-entity accounts have no cash line) with a usable cash figure: 4,164 of the 7,481 checked trading companies file micro-entity accounts and are not in these figures. One company whose printed accounts show bank accounts its cash tag omits is also left out of them.
• Median cash as a share of creditors counts companies with creditors due within a year above zero (45%, 3,165 companies); counting the companies that held cash but had no such creditors as covered in full gives 48% (3,245 companies; the 30 with neither cash nor such creditors are left out).
• 95% range: sampling error only (Wilson interval for percentages, exact order-statistic interval for medians). It does not cover the selection effects below, and a range for one group is not a test of the difference between two groups.

The figures

Caveats, stated up front

• A two-month filing sample, not all UK companies. The sample is companies that filed accounts at Companies House in June and July 2026. Filing deadlines bunch them by year end: 3,511 of the 7,481 checked companies have balance sheets dated September 2025 and October 2025. These are not official statistics.
• Past balance sheets. 5,403 are dated in 2025, 2,045 in 2026 and 33 earlier.
• Who is left out, and which way it leans. The companies we had to leave out do not look like a neutral gap: 349 trading companies left out still report a net current assets figure, and 61.3% of those report net current liabilities as printed (not verified by our check), against 37.1% of the companies kept. That suggests the net current liabilities rate is more likely a little low than high; for the cash figures we cannot tell.
• Balance-sheet measures only. Most small companies file balance-sheet-only accounts, so nothing here can be read as a length of time or a cushion in months.
• Rounding allowance. Cash, debtors and cash plus debtors may exceed current assets by up to £1 (rounding in the subtotal); none may be negative.
• Net current liabilities is not insolvency. Some healthy businesses run negative working capital by design.
• Other readings of the same data. Leaving out the 542 sign-corrected companies gives 32.4% net current liabilities; taking the 531 bracketed figures at their recorded positive sign gives 30.0%. Neither matches the printed accounts, so neither is a bound; they show how much the corrections matter.
• Sectors. Sector tables exclude 33 companies with a dormant industry code, 258 with no usable code, and sectors with fewer than 150 checked companies (agriculture 71). Figures based on fewer than 80 companies are not shown.

Version note

This is version 2 of the dataset (28 September 2026). It supersedes the figures we used earlier in public, on our negative net cash article and video (which described the sample as 7,000 companies) and in a draft of these pages that was marked noindex. That first version dropped every filing made through Companies House's own online forms, did not check that the figures added up, missed a common way of recording creditors and read printed dashes as missing rather than zero. The corrected figures are the ones above: net current liabilities 37.1% (was 37.3%), negative net cash 41.2% (was 37.2%), less cash than creditors due within a year 63.7% (was 63.8%), £1,000 or less in the bank 19.5% (was 20.6%), median cash £13,654 (was £12,327).