Home › Analysis › 12 September 2026
The healthiest companies in Britain are the ones that do almost nothing
Dormant companies, holding companies and service-charge vehicles file the cleanest balance sheets on the register. There is a reason.
Sort the register by which industries file the fewest deficits and the top of the list is not an industry at all. Dormant companies, residents property management and holding companies file 88,489 sets of accounts between them, and only 6.9 per cent report liabilities larger than assets, against 17.4 per cent across everything else.
Key points
- This group runs at 6.9 per cent in deficit against 17.4 per cent nationally.
- Dormant companies alone filed 25,947 sets of accounts.
- They are 7.0 per cent of every filing we have read.
The group
| Classification | Accounts | In deficit |
|---|---|---|
| Residents property management | 34,199 | 4.6% |
| Dormant Company | 25,947 | 4.6% |
| Activities of other holding companies n.e.c. | 24,839 | 11.8% |
| Activities of financial services holding companies | 1,549 | 12.3% |
| Activities of construction holding companies | 1,081 | 9.4% |
| Activities of production holding companies | 530 | 9.8% |
| Activities of distribution holding companies | 344 | 12.5% |
Why this matters for every other number
Roughly one filing in 14 on the register comes from a company that is not really trading. They file because the law requires it, their balance sheets are close to empty, and they almost never report a deficit.
That drags the national average down. The 17.4 per cent headline rate is therefore a floor rather than a picture of trading Britain: strip these out and the rate among companies actually doing something is higher.
What a dormant company is
A company that had no significant accounting transactions in the period. Many are kept alive to hold a name, to protect a brand, or because dissolving them is more trouble than filing a one-page account each year. They are not evidence of anything except that somebody is still paying the filing fee.
What this does and does not mean
A deficit here means the accounts reported liabilities larger than assets at the balance sheet date. It is not insolvency. Companies funded by a parent or by director loans routinely report negative net assets while paying everything they owe, which is why this reports groups rather than naming companies.
Companies House does not verify the information filed with it. Everything here is what companies reported about themselves.
What happens next
We are considering publishing the headline rate both ways, with and without the non-trading companies, because the second number is the more honest answer to the question most people are asking.
How this was produced. Companies House publishes the accounts registered with it as open data each working day. Cap News downloads that file, reads the tagged figures out of each filing and joins them to the company register. Nothing here is hand picked. The method sets out what is counted and what is not.