The short answer
There are two official places to check whether an individual is bankrupt in England and Wales.
- The Individual Insolvency Register, maintained by the Insolvency Service. It covers bankruptcies, debt relief orders (DROs) and individual voluntary arrangements (IVAs) — but only while they are current or within three months of ending.
- The Gazette, the official public record. It carries the statutory notices that make up a bankruptcy: statutory demands, bankruptcy orders, trustee appointments, dividend notices, annulments and discharges. It is permanent.
Companies House is not one of them. It covers companies, not people. If you are checking a sole trader, a personal guarantor or a consumer debtor, Companies House will tell you nothing about their personal insolvency status.
Neither source is complete on its own. Which one you need depends on what you are actually trying to establish.
What the Individual Insolvency Register covers
The Individual Insolvency Register is free, searchable by name, and run by the Insolvency Service. It holds:
- bankruptcies that are current, or where the bankrupt was discharged in the last three months
- DROs that are current, or that ended in the last three months
- IVAs that are current, or that ended in the last three months
That three-month rule is the thing most people miss. An entry is deleted three months after discharge, revocation or the end of the arrangement. The register answers "is this person insolvent right now?" It does not answer "has this person ever been insolvent?"
It is also a one-name-at-a-time search. That is fine for a single check before extending credit. It is impractical the moment you are reviewing a ledger.
What The Gazette covers — and what it does not
The Gazette is the official public record of the United Kingdom, published by TSO under the superintendence of His Majesty's Stationery Office. The Insolvency Act 1986 and the Insolvency (England and Wales) Rules 2016 require certain insolvency events to be published there — a process known as gazetting.
The Gazette's own guide to personal insolvency notices sets out which notice types appear:
- Statutory demands (notice code 2501)
- Substituted service of a petition (2502)
- Bankruptcy orders, including partnerships (2503, 2504)
- Appointment of trustees (2507)
- Notice of intended dividend (2509), and the final notice to prove a debt
- Annulment of proceedings (2512)
- Discharge orders (2515)
What is absent from that list matters just as much. DROs and IVAs are not part of The Gazette's personal insolvency notice set. They are recorded on the Individual Insolvency Register instead. If your debtor has entered an IVA, The Gazette is not where you will find out. For collections teams, see why screening your debtor book for insolvency pays.
The trade-off runs the other way on permanence. Gazette notices are not deleted. The Gazette does instruct search engines to exclude personal insolvency notices from their results one year and three months after placement — so a Google search goes quiet long before the record does — but the notice remains part of the official public record.
The numbers explain where to look
In July 2026, 11,926 individuals entered insolvency in England and Wales, 14% higher than in July 2025. That figure broke down as:
- 664 bankruptcies
- 3,820 debt relief orders
- 7,442 individual voluntary arrangements
So roughly one in eighteen personal insolvencies is a bankruptcy. The other seventeen are DROs and IVAs, and they do not generate Gazette personal insolvency notices.
The direction of travel is also worth noting. In the twelve months ending 31 July 2026, one in 360 adults in England and Wales entered insolvency — a rate of 27.8 per 10,000 adults, up from 24.3 per 10,000 (one in 412) in the twelve months to 31 July 2025.
There is a third signal that appears on neither register. There were 5,248 Breathing Space registrations in July 2026. A standard breathing space gives a debtor a 60-day pause from most enforcement action and creditor contact. It is not a public register you can search — you find out because you are notified, and you must apply the protections to that debt once you are.
Reading a bankruptcy notice trail
If the person you are checking is on the bankruptcy track, the Gazette notices arrive in a sequence. Each one tells you something different about what you can do next.
The statutory demand comes first
A statutory demand is the opening move. It is deemed served on the debtor on the date the Gazette notice first appears, and the debtor then has 21 days to deal with it before they risk bankruptcy proceedings.
This is the single most useful notice for a creditor, because it is the only one that arrives before anything is decided. It tells you another creditor is moving, and it tells you roughly how long you have.
The bankruptcy order
Once an order is made, the official receiver must gazette it, advertise it in a local paper, and notify the chief land registrar for the register of writs and orders affecting land. A creditor can petition where they are owed £5,000 or more, either alone or as a share of debts totalling that amount. Debtors apply through the adjudicator instead.
Appointment of a trustee
Once a trustee is appointed, they are your counterparty. Collections activity against the debtor stops; your claim is made in the bankruptcy.
Notice of intended dividend, and the final notice to prove
These are the deadline notices, and they are the ones that cost money when missed. The trustee gazettes a notice of intended dividend specifying a last date for proving, and is not obliged to deal with proofs lodged after it. The final notice to prove is the last call: creditors who do not submit particulars of their debt by the stated date are excluded from the benefit of any dividend declared, and cannot disturb it afterwards.
Discharge or annulment
A bankrupt is generally discharged one year from the date of the bankruptcy order. Discharge releases them from most of the debts included in the bankruptcy. An annulment is different — it cancels the bankruptcy order entirely, usually because it should never have been made, or because an IVA was approved instead.
What this means for a collections or credit team
Three practical consequences follow from all of the above.
- Checking one source gives you one answer. The register tells you about current DROs and IVAs. The Gazette tells you about the bankruptcy track, including the statutory demand stage that no register shows.
- The valuable window is early. By the time an order is gazetted, your position is largely fixed. The statutory demand and, for corporate debtors, the winding-up petition are where a creditor still has options.
- Deadlines are hard, not soft. The last date for proving is real. A claim lodged after it is simply out.
Checking one name versus checking a book
A single name is easy. The Individual Insolvency Register is free and takes a minute, and The Gazette's public search will find notices for a name you already suspect.
A ledger is a different problem. If you are screening several thousand customers, guarantors or counterparties, one-at-a-time search is not a method — it is a staffing decision. The Gazette's own Research Service exists for exactly this reason and is priced accordingly, from around £30 for a single name, £24 per name for two to five, and £20 per name for six to ten. That is sensible for a handful of careful checks. It does not scale to a book.
Gazette Search UK was built for the other end of that curve. You upload a CSV or Excel file, or paste names, company numbers or postcodes, and screen them against UK Gazette notices in a single pass — insolvency, winding-up and deceased estate notices — with up to 50,000 identifiers per run. Results come back structured: parties, insolvency practitioners, courts, case numbers and deadlines, split into matched and not found, and exported to CSV. Credits are pay-as-you-go and charged only when a search finds a notice — no subscription, no minimum. There is a demo panel on the homepage that takes up to 150 entries, free, with no signup, if you want to test it against a sample of your own book first. Watchlists and an API are in development and are not live yet.
It is built on notices from The Gazette, the official public record, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a free way to check if someone is bankrupt in the UK?
Yes. The Individual Insolvency Register, run by the Insolvency Service, is free to search by name and covers bankruptcies, DROs and IVAs in England and Wales. It only shows cases that are current or that ended within the last three months, and it searches one name at a time.
Does The Gazette show IVAs and debt relief orders?
The Gazette's personal insolvency notice codes cover the bankruptcy track — statutory demands, bankruptcy orders, trustee appointments, dividend notices, annulments and discharges. DROs and IVAs are not part of that set; they are recorded on the Individual Insolvency Register. Since IVAs and DROs together make up the large majority of personal insolvencies, checking only The Gazette will miss most consumer cases.
How long does a bankruptcy stay on the Individual Insolvency Register?
An entry is deleted three months after the date of discharge. Because most bankrupts are discharged one year from the date of the order, a typical bankruptcy is visible on the register for around fifteen months in total. The Gazette notices, by contrast, remain on the official record permanently.
What is the minimum debt for a creditor to petition for someone's bankruptcy?
A creditor must be owed £5,000 or more, either on their own or as a share of debts totalling at least that amount. The threshold rose from £750 to £5,000 for petitions presented on or after 1 October 2015.
How do I check a whole list of names at once?
Manual search does not scale past a few dozen names. Bulk screening tools let you upload a file of names, company numbers or postcodes and match the whole list against Gazette notices in one pass, returning structured results and a clear split between matched and not found. Gazette Search UK handles up to 50,000 identifiers per run and charges only for searches that find a notice — see gazette-search.co.uk or the pricing page.