How we count companies with invoice finance

At 3 November 2026, 34,304 companies had an invoice finance charge on the Companies House register that had not been recorded as ended. That is a guide to how many limited companies may use invoice finance, not an exact count of customers. Some of these facilities have ended, and some businesses using invoice finance are not in it.

Four counts, four questions

34,304

Companies with at least one invoice finance charge not recorded as ended.

Use it for: Our main count. The closest we have to how many companies may use invoice finance now.

30,008

The same 34,304, limited to companies still active on the register.

Use it for: When you want to leave out companies that are closing or in insolvency.

37,256

Companies with an invoice finance charge filed since January 2015, ended or not.

Use it for: How many companies have taken it on in the last decade or so.

at least 58,802

Companies that have ever had an invoice finance charge, ended or not, charges dated August 1966 to October 2026. Dissolved companies are not in our data, so the true figure is higher.

Use it for: How many companies have used invoice finance at some point. Never as a count of current users.

Source for all four: our analysis of the Companies House register of charges, as at 3 November 2026. Method below; full tables on our key figures page.

What we count as invoice finance

A charge counts when its first-named holder is on our invoice finance lender list, version 22 October 2026. The list and its name merges are published on our market activity page. A company is counted once, however many charges it has.

Why the count is not exact

  • Ended facilities can still show. A lender can file that a charge has been satisfied, under section 859L of the Companies Act 2006, but the Act does not require it, so an ended charge can stay on the register. We cannot say how often that happens.
  • Only companies and LLPs appear. The charge registration rules apply to charges created by a company, so sole traders and ordinary partnerships are not in it.
  • Some facilities have no charge registered at all, or one held by a lender not on our list. An outright sale of invoices is not a charge, so the registration rules do not cover it (the Law Commission report on company security interests, 2005, recommended bringing such sales in; the rules still apply to charges only). Some selective and single invoice finance works this way, so the count may miss more of those facilities than of whole-book ones.
  • Status is as at our last check of each company. On 3 November 2026 our copy covered 805,926 of the 831,742 companies the register shows with a charge (96.9%).

Where the data comes from, and what you can check

We built our own copy of the register from the Companies House charges API and keep it current from the charges stream. Company status comes from the Free Company Data Product.

That free file gives the number of charges per company but no lender names, so it cannot produce this count alone. You can check any single company's charges on Companies House. Repeating the full count means collecting every company's charges through the API.

Full figures are on our key figures page.

Author: Adam Parker (ORCID 0009-0008-0368-4408)

Publisher: Muswell Rose Consulting Ltd (company number 15269776). This page is hosted on MarketInvoice. The figures are aggregate counts from public sources with the method stated on the page.

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