How long insolvency takes: petition notices and CVL duration

A winding-up petition is usually on the court file for about five weeks before anyone can read it in The Gazette. Of 444 petitions advertised in August 2026, the median notice appeared 37 days after the petition was presented and 13 days before the hearing. Payments are at risk from presentation, not from the notice, and no official source records when banks freeze accounts. A creditors' voluntary liquidation takes far longer: the Insolvency Service found a median of 712 days, just under two years, from the liquidator's appointment to the company's dissolution. The Gazette; Insolvency Service

Data as of: Gazette petition notices first published 1 to 31 August 2026, read 24 September 2026 · CVL figures from the Insolvency Service's CVL research report, published 17 December 2024 · England and Wales only. For your own petition dates, use the petition timeline tool.

From petition to Gazette notice: what 444 real petitions show

Every winding-up petition notice in The Gazette prints three dates: when the petition was presented to the court, when the notice was published, and when the hearing is. We read every petition notice first published from 1 to 31 August 2026 (510 notices), kept the 444 in the courts of England and Wales, and measured the gaps. Petitions in Scotland and Northern Ireland (62 notices) follow different rules and are left out, as are 4 notices that replaced an earlier notice for the same petition.

Only 6.3% of these petitions were in The Gazette within three weeks of being presented, 40.8% within five weeks and 84.9% within six. The rules explain the floor: unless the company is petitioning itself or the court directs otherwise, the notice cannot go in until at least 7 business days after the petition is served on the company (rule 7.10(4)), and service itself comes after presentation. The few notices that appeared within days of presentation may be among those exceptions. 8.6% took longer than eight weeks, the longest 235 days, and the notices do not say why.

Most petitioners advertise at the last permitted moment

Rule 7.10 says the notice must appear at least 7 business days before the hearing, unless the court directs otherwise. Counting the business days strictly between the notice date and the hearing date, 61% of these notices landed on exactly 7, which on that clear-days count is the latest date the rule allows.

A notice cannot show whether the court gave a direction about advertising, so the 28 notices with fewer than 7 business days are not evidence that any petition broke the rule. What the pattern does show is that, for most companies, the public notice comes roughly two weeks before the hearing, and by then the petition has usually been on the court file for over a month.

When does the bank freeze the account?

No official source records how many days after a petition banks freeze accounts. What is fixed in law is the reason banks act. If a winding-up order is made, the winding up is treated as starting on the day the petition was presented (section 129(2)), and any payment out of company property since then is void unless the court orders otherwise (section 127). Gov.uk's own guidance puts it plainly: the company's bank account "will be frozen when someone files a petition", and the company then needs a validation order from the court to use it.

A bank can only act on a petition it knows about. The Gazette notice is the first time the petition is published, so a bank that has not been told about it directly may not know until then. On the August 2026 figures, that means the account can stay open for a median of 37 days after presentation while every payment made from it is already exposed. That is our reading of the dates, not a measured freeze date. The practical point is the opposite of what many directors assume: the risk starts with the petition, not with the freeze.

How long a CVL takes

The official source on CVL length is the Insolvency Service's 2024 research report, which notes that there are no readily available statistics on how long insolvency proceedings in England and Wales take in general. It took a random sample of 2,900 of the 10,197 CVLs that began in England and Wales in 2017, and measured each completed case from the day the liquidator was appointed to the day the company was dissolved.

The report lists reasons a case can run this long: lengthy asset investigations, the sale of a property, a debt being paid off over a long period, or legal proceedings. It also found that longer cases were moderately associated with higher returns to creditors. For comparison, it points to administration, which has an initial period of 12 months that can only be extended with the approval of creditors or the court.

How the 2,717 cases spread out

The report prints its duration chart (Figure 1) in 100-day bands but not the number in each band. We read the bar heights from the published chart, using its own axis. The readings add up to 2,689 against the 2,717 cases the report analysed, so treat each figure as accurate to a few cases, not as a published count. On these readings, about 10% of completed CVLs were dissolved within 400 days, 49% within 700 days, 76% within 1,100 days (about three years) and 91% within 1,600 days.

The CVL timetable the law sets

Most of the two years is not set by any rule. The fixed deadlines cluster at the start, in the first two weeks after the resolution, and at the end, where the final account, the 8-week objection window and the 3 months before dissolution add up to several months after the liquidator's work is finished. In between, the liquidator reports once a year until the affairs are wound up.

Methodology and sources

Petition gaps. We listed every notice with notice code 2450 (Petitions to Wind Up (Companies)) first published in The Gazette from 1 to 31 August 2026, using the Gazette's own notice feed, and read each notice for the presentation, publication and hearing dates it prints. Notices in the courts of England and Wales were kept. Petitions in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and notices published in substitution for an earlier notice were left out. Calendar days are simple date differences. Business days are the days strictly between the two dates, excluding weekends, Christmas Day and bank holidays in England and Wales or Scotland, as section 251 of the Insolvency Act 1986 defines a business day, using the gov.uk bank holiday lists. One month of notices is a snapshot: court listing patterns can shift, and a notice cannot tell us when the petition was served, so we cannot measure the gap from service. The script that does this, scripts/build-insolvency-timings.py, stops without writing anything if the feed or the notices stop parsing cleanly.

CVL duration. The figures in the CVL table are as printed in the Insolvency Service report. The banded distribution is our reading of the report's Figure 1, checked against the report's own figures: the band where the running total passes half contains the published median of 712 days, and the first and last bands contain the published shortest and longest cases. The cases began in 2017, before HMRC regained preferential status in December 2020, and the report notes that newer cases cannot yet be measured fairly because many have not finished. Statutory time limits were read from the current text on legislation.gov.uk on 24 September 2026, and each row links to its provision. This page is general information, not legal or insolvency advice.