The UK refinancing wall, 2026–2028.

A queue of maturing debt, papered between 2020 and 2024.

The refinancing wall — often called the maturity wall — is the concentration of company debt falling due for renewal across 2026 to 2028. Facilities written in the pandemic-era lending of 2020, the recovery lending of 2021 and the repricing wave of 2022 to 2024 were mostly signed on customary three-to-five-year senior terms, so they age into their refinancing windows together. Facilities papered in one period mature in one period: that is the whole mechanism, and it is why the wall does not require anything further to happen. It only requires time to pass.

Most published estimates of the wall are built from the top down, from scheme-lending vintages, leveraged-loan samples or survey sentiment. Ours is built from the bottom up. Companies House publishes every security interest a UK company grants — who holds it, when it was created, what it covers — and we scored 83,957 lower-mid-market companies against that register. 26,383 of them carry an outstanding registered charge whose age implies an estimated refinancing window; 14,675 were inside that window at 7 July 2026. The full analysis, with charts, is in the flagship research piece, and the method is summarised at the foot of this page.

The wall is a plateau, not a spike.

Because the estimated windows are years wide, the honest measure is not how many facilities mature in a given quarter but how much paper sits inside its refinancing zone at any moment. On that measure the wall reads as a plateau: between 15,519 and 16,808 estimated windows are open in every quarter from the start of 2026 through mid-2027, peaking at 16,808 in the second quarter of 2027, before tapering to 9,282 by the end of 2028. A spike is a scheduling problem; a plateau is a capacity problem, because the same lender credit teams, advisers and lawyers have to clear an elevated volume for eight consecutive quarters. A borrower who assumes the crowd thins out next year is misreading the shape: the pressure holds through mid-2027.

Five banking groups hold more than half of it.

Among the 14,675 in-window companies, 13,750 carry a named incumbent — 1,667 distinct charge-holding entities — but the distribution is anything but flat. Folded to banking groups, five names hold 52.5% of the primary charges, and clearing banks as a category hold 54.9%. A further 925 charges sit with bare security trustees, where a real facility is implied but the lender behind it is not disclosed, and 4,068 with corporate holders the register does not name in a recognisable form — counted in every denominator, so the named shares are floors.

Both of the obvious readings of that concentration are wrong. It does not show that banks are the wrong home for this paper — for most of these borrowers a bank facility was, and often still is, the cheapest and simplest answer, and plenty of these refinancings should end exactly where they started. Nor is the concentration harmless: when five credit desks face half the wall at once, each is triaging, and its pricing on any given renewal reflects its book, its sector appetite that quarter and its capacity — none of which the borrower can see. The consequence is the same whichever way an individual decision goes: an in-window borrower has more to gain from a genuine competitive process than in a normal year, even when the best outcome is the incumbent matching a better term sheet.

Aggregate register data, stated with its limits.

The method in one paragraph: each outstanding registered charge is assigned a customary facility tenor from its type and holder — a clearing-bank or challenger debenture reads as a four-year facility give or take eighteen months, a debt-fund charge as a six-year unitranche — and the estimated refinancing window is the creation date plus that tenor. Rolling facilities, invoice finance and ABL are excluded because they carry no refinancing clock; rent-deposit, pension and landlord charges are excluded because they are not facilities. One company, one primary window. Every window is an estimate, typically three years wide; a charge proves security was granted, not that the facility is still outstanding; and the 83,957 companies are a prioritised sample of a much larger universe, so every count is a floor. The cohort sizes, the origination vintages and the concentration of holders are the hard part of the data, and they are what this page leans on.