The research desk.
Practitioner analysis of UK lower-mid-market debt, written by the senior adviser who runs the mandates and grounded in how these deals are actually done. We track the lender landscape, the cost and structure of capital, and the refinancing cycle.
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Refinancing
More than 14,500 companies are in the window
We scored 83,957 UK lower-mid-market companies against the Companies House charge register. 26,383 carry an outstanding charge old enough to imply a refinancing window, 14,675 are inside that estimated window right now, and five banking groups hold more than half of them.
Market review · The quarter in debt
Supply and sentiment are out of phase
A six-year view from the desk. The lower-mid-market borrower of mid-2026 faces a deeper and more competitive field of capital than at any point since 2020, even as the maturity wall crests and CFO sentiment stays defensive.
Lender landscape
The bank retreat
The big-five banks now provide a minority of new lending to smaller UK companies. For a borrower, that is the case for running a process rather than accepting the first quote.
Market review · The quarter in debt
The year the recovery stuck
A full-year read on a recovering market. Private-debt deal counts climbed back toward cycle highs, debt funds held a commanding share of UK mid-cap finance, and the deal book tilted back toward LBOs and bolt-ons after a bruising 2023.
Refinancing
The 2026 maturity wall starts here
The Covid loans drawn in 2020 reach final maturity in 2026, and the Bank of England already sees roughly 30% of UK leveraged-loan debt falling due by the end of 2025. For a lower-mid-market borrower, the refinancing calendar is now the planning calendar.
The archive
2026
- 11 Jul 2026
Refinancing
More than 14,500 companies are in the window
We scored 83,957 UK lower-mid-market companies against the Companies House charge register. 26,383 carry an outstanding charge old enough to imply a refinancing window, 14,675 are inside that estimated window right now, and five banking groups hold more than half of them.
- 17 Jun 2026
Deal structure
The six-year arc of the cost of credit, and what it teaches
From deeply cheap in 2021 to near-GFC highs in 2023, then easing through 2025, the perceived cost of credit traced a full cycle. Read as a structuring lesson, the pattern tells a borrower what to negotiate.
- 20 May 2026
Raising debt
Funding growth and capex without giving up the equity
With SME equity investment down 20% and private-credit deployment near a record, the relative case for funding growth with debt rather than equity has strengthened for the right lower-mid-market borrower.
- 22 Apr 2026
Market review
Supply and sentiment are out of phase
A six-year view from the desk. The lower-mid-market borrower of mid-2026 faces a deeper and more competitive field of capital than at any point since 2020, even as the maturity wall crests and CFO sentiment stays defensive.
- 19 Mar 2026
Lender landscape
Challenger share holds at sixty per cent
For the second year running, challenger and specialist banks held 60% of UK gross SME bank lending in 2025. The big-five banks' gross lending, at £27bn, sat at its third-lowest level on record. The shift has settled, and a borrower's search strategy should reflect that.
- 5 Mar 2026
Market review
The strongest unitranche year since 2021
European mid-cap unitranche closed 2025 at 570 deals, and the UK led the year-end surge. Debt funds kept their hold on the key jurisdictions.
- 15 Jan 2026
Lender landscape
A trillion dollars looking for borrowers
The global private-credit market reached $3.5tn AUM in 2025, with roughly $1tn of dry powder waiting to be deployed. For a lower-mid-market borrower raising £3–15m, what counts is less the headline than the competition it creates at the smaller end.
2025
- 18 Sept 2025
Refinancing
Refinancing a Covid loan through the Growth Guarantee Scheme
The Growth Guarantee Scheme, extended to 2030, is one route to refinance a maturing CBILS or RLS facility. It is not the only one. The right route depends on what the credit can support on its own.
- 17 Jul 2025
Market review
The tariff shock and the sentiment break
A sharp swing in CFO sentiment in Q2 2025 marked the largest single-quarter credit-availability deterioration of the window. The deal data held up even as the mood soured, exposing the gap between sentiment and supply.
- 19 Mar 2025
Lender landscape
The quiet record in asset finance
Asset finance new business reached record levels, with non-bank lenders supplying a growing share. For an asset-rich lower-mid-market company, ABL is often cheaper headroom than a cash-flow loan, and it is consistently overlooked.
- 4 Mar 2025
Lender landscape
The bank retreat
The big-five banks now provide a minority of new lending to smaller UK companies. For a borrower, that is the case for running a process rather than accepting the first quote.
- 19 Feb 2025
For sponsors
Financing the search-fund and independent-sponsor acquisition
Sponsorless and independent-sponsor deals are a growing slice of private-debt activity. The financing playbook differs from a fund-backed LBO, and the lender's diligence questions land differently when there is no PE house behind the borrower.
- 23 Jan 2025
Deal structure
The covenant that bites first
With Bank Rate settling well above the 2010s norm, leverage multiples and covenant packages reset. A borrower's debt-service coverage, not the headline multiple, became the binding constraint.
2024
- 21 Nov 2024
Market review
The year the recovery stuck
A full-year read on a recovering market. Private-debt deal counts climbed back toward cycle highs, debt funds held a commanding share of UK mid-cap finance, and the deal book tilted back toward LBOs and bolt-ons after a bruising 2023.
- 19 Sept 2024
Refinancing
The Covid loan book has a countdown
By late 2024, most CBILS facilities were well advanced in repayment and Bounce Back loans were grinding through their final years. The settled-claims line, the taxpayer's realised loss, kept climbing toward the 2026 maturity peak.
- 18 Jul 2024
Raising debt
Acquisition finance for the lower-mid-market
Most private-debt deals fund an acquisition, not a refinancing. For a £1–8m EBITDA company making its first bolt-on, the structuring choices made at the outset shape the next three years of headroom.
- 20 Jun 2024
Refinancing
Refinancing from strength, not necessity
UK corporate net debt-to-earnings is near a twenty-year low. Balance sheets are healthier than the maturity-wall headlines suggest, and the advantage has a shelf life.
- 16 May 2024
Market review
The 2024 recovery, confirmed
Deal flow re-accelerated into 2024. UK mid-cap transactions rose around 18% year on year in Q1, debt funds re-extended their lead to 77% of UK activity, and the H2 2023 rebound from the trough has carried through into the new year.
- 22 Feb 2024
Refinancing
The 2026 maturity wall starts here
The Covid loans drawn in 2020 reach final maturity in 2026, and the Bank of England already sees roughly 30% of UK leveraged-loan debt falling due by the end of 2025. For a lower-mid-market borrower, the refinancing calendar is now the planning calendar.
2023
- 20 Nov 2023
Lender landscape
What $1 trillion of private credit means for a UK borrower
The private-credit asset class kept compounding through the downturn, with surveyed managers deploying $333bn in 2022 alone. For a lower-mid-market company, what counts is less the headline AUM than how much of that capital is hunting deals at the smaller end.
- 12 Oct 2023
Lender landscape
Unitranche is now the majority UK mid-market structure
By 2023, unitranche — the debt-fund instrument — was the majority structure in UK private-debt deals, and debt funds wrote most of the UK's sponsored unitranche financings. The bank-comeback narrative of that year was real but partial, and the structural penetration held.
- 18 Aug 2023
Market review
The 2023 trough and the rebound off it
European mid-cap unitranche deal flow hit its lowest quarter of the cycle in Q2 2023 at just 62 deals. The trough is now identifiable, and early signals point to recovery. A borrower in a quiet market commands better terms than the same borrower in a hot one.
- 26 Jan 2023
Deal structure
Personal guarantees are negotiable
As scheme lending wound down and credit tightened, personal guarantees returned to lower-mid-market term sheets. Whether one is a protective backstop or an open-ended exposure comes down to how it is scoped.
2022
- 25 Nov 2022
Market review
Deal flow held through the rate shock
Despite the fastest rate cycle in a generation, private-debt deal flow reached 871 trailing deals by autumn 2022, up 51% on the Autumn 2021 edition. The tracker itself rebranded, reflecting an asset class that had earned its place in the market.
- 20 Oct 2022
Market update
When credit stopped being cheap
Through 2022 the cost-of-credit perception flipped from deeply cheap to firmly expensive, and the mini-budget knocked availability to a post-Covid low. The borrowing terms of 2021 were no longer on offer.
- 17 Feb 2022
Deal structure
The unitranche reflex
Unitranche has become the default for mid-market buyouts, taking roughly seven in ten UK alternative-lender structures. The single-tranche convenience has a price, and the trade-off is sharpest at the lower-mid-market level.
2021
- 4 Nov 2021
Market review
The 2021 record run
Post-Covid deal flow rebounded to records. Alternative-lender deal counts and European unitranche volumes both hit highs, and the buyout share held above 70%. The lesson of a hot market is what you negotiate while it lasts.
- 15 Apr 2021
Lender landscape
Why the challenger banks' share fell to 32%
The 2020 Covid-scheme year pushed the challenger and specialist banks' share of UK gross SME lending down to 32%, its lowest on record. Strip that distortion out and the structural picture is unchanged: by 2018 they were already lending more than half. For a borrower, the high-street relationship is now one option among many.
- 28 Jan 2021
Market review
Cheap credit, reluctant borrowers
Through the pandemic, CFOs rated credit cheap and broadly available. The sentiment data is a large-cap proxy, but the direction of travel set the tone every lower-mid-market borrower negotiated against.
2020
- 22 Oct 2020
Market review
Deal flow at the Covid trough
Mid-market private-debt activity dipped but did not seize. Lenders that pulled back on new deals stayed open to existing borrowers, and the buyout share of the book actually rose.
- 9 Apr 2020
Market update
CBILS comes with a six-year clock
The government guarantee schemes are routing unprecedented volume through the big-five banks in weeks. The terms borrowers accept now set a maturity date most have not yet thought about.
- 20 Feb 2020
Market review
The lender field was already plural by 2020
Where £3–15m borrowers stood as the decade opened: direct lenders had built a near-2,000-deal European book with the UK its largest market, more than half of finance-seeking SMEs already went beyond the big-five banks, and Bank Rate sat at 0.75%.
For the shape of the market itself, see the map of the market, or read the state of it in the quarterly monitor, collected.