Why B2B prospect lists go stale: what ten years of Companies House data shows

A list of UK companies starts decaying the day it is built. Of the companies incorporated in 2022, 60.1% have already been dissolved; of those formed in 2023, 55.2%. Even the newest cohort thins quickly: 26.3% of companies formed in 2024 were dissolved by the end of 2025. Any prospect list that isn't checked against the live register is, within a year or two, substantially a list of companies that no longer exist.

These figures come from our company survival study, which follows every UK incorporation from 2016 to 2025 — 7,573,361 companies — using exact Companies House counts retrieved on 8 October 2026.

How fast company lists decay

The table shows the share of each year's new companies dissolved by the end of the first, second and third calendar year after incorporation.

Two things stand out. First, between 42% and 55% of every cohort is gone within three calendar years. Second, the decay is getting faster: the share dissolved by the end of the first year rose from 17.6% for companies formed in 2016 to 26.3% for those formed in 2024, and the two-year figure from 40.0% to 48.2% (2023 cohort).

Ages here are by calendar year, so "year 1" means up to 31 December of the year after incorporation — between 12 and 24 months of life. The full curve, every cohort and the method are in the study.

Dissolved doesn't mean failed — but it does mean gone

Most dissolved companies weren't insolvent. They were struck off by their own directors because the project ended, the contractor took a job, or the vehicle was no longer needed. For a seller that distinction doesn't help: whatever the reason, a dissolved company cannot buy from you, and an email to its old address is wasted at best and a deliverability problem at worst.

Decay varies a lot by line of business

Following the 2020 cohort for five full years, the share of companies not dissolved varied more than twofold by SIC code:

A list of new online retailers decays roughly twice as fast as a list of new property-letting companies. (Companies can list up to four SIC codes, so these groups overlap.)

What this means for how you prospect

1. Build lists from the live register, not from a file. A purchased or exported list is a snapshot. Given the rates above, a list built from 2023 incorporations is now majority-dissolved. Status should be checked at the moment of outreach, not the moment of purchase.

2. Reach new companies early. The months after incorporation are when a company makes most of its first supplier decisions — bank, accountant, insurer, website, software. They are also the months before attrition thins the cohort. Speed matters more than list size.

3. Match your cadence to your market's decay rate. If you sell into high-churn sectors like online retail or haulage, work lists in weeks, not quarters. In lower-churn sectors such as property letting, account-based approaches have time to pay off.

4. Watch the companies you care about. A status change — to proposed strike-off, in liquidation or dissolved — is the moment to remove a company from a sequence or check on a customer. Company monitoring flags these changes automatically. See company status meanings for what each status signals.

Build a list that is current today

CompaniesIQ reads the register live, so every list reflects company status at the moment you open it. Start with active companies formed in the last 12 months in a sector you sell to, or pick a code from the SIC directory. Sales teams can see the full workflow in CompaniesIQ for sales teams, and free new-company alerts deliver new registrations every week.

Figures: exact Companies House counts from the CompaniesIQ company survival study, retrieved 8 October 2026, under the Open Government Licence v3.0.