A Statement of Affairs is the directors' sworn statement of what the company owns and what it owes, signed on a statement of truth and filed at Companies House (form AM02) within 75 days of the administrator's appointment. It is the first authoritative figure for how much money the company is actually short, and it sets the expectation creditors should hold for the rest of the case.
The rest of this page is how to read it: what each line means, what the numbers look like across 109 parsed UK Statements of Affairs in our dataset, and how to read whether a case is going to pay a dividend or not. If your customer is in liquidation rather than administration the equivalent filing is the liquidator's statement; the creditor mechanics are covered on our liquidation creditor page.
The Statement of Affairs is a four-column accounting summary. Down the left are the categories of asset and liability. Across the top are the values: book value, estimated realisable value, claims by class. The summary at the bottom is what creditors and the administrator look at first.
Assets are listed by class: assets specifically pledged (with the secured creditor identified); other assets (debtors, stock, plant, intellectual property, cash). For each, two numbers: the book value and the estimated realisable value. The estimate is the directors' best guess at what the asset would fetch in an orderly sale during the administration. Routinely turns out to be optimistic once the auctioneer's hammer comes down.
Liabilities are listed in priority order. Fixed-charge creditors (with the specific assets they hold security over). Preferential creditors, split into ordinary (employees, broadly capped at four months of wages and accrued holiday pay) and secondary (HMRC, for PAYE, employee NICs, and VAT, since the Finance Act 2020). Floating-charge creditors. Then the unsecured class: trade creditors, HMRC for corporation tax, the directors' loan accounts if any, all sitting pari passu.
Five numbers at the bottom of the form are the ones to read.
We OCR every AM02 we can get from Companies House and parse the figures with a label-anchored extractor (about a 77 percent extraction rate across 141 attempted filings at parser v4). The numbers below are medians and quartiles from the cleanly-parsed subset.
The distribution is heavily right-skewed. The middle 50 percent of cases sit between roughly £1m and £11.5m of declared total deficiency; the long tail runs into hundreds of millions for the largest household-name failures. The smallest declared deficiencies in our sample are well under £100k: small owner-managed companies where the gap is real but contained.
The line that matters most to a trade creditor is the third one down: estimated total assets available for unsecured creditors. About 48 percent of parsed SoAs report zero or a negative figure on that line, before the prescribed part is applied. The unsecured creditor's realistic recovery in those cases comes entirely from the prescribed part: up to £800,000 ringfenced from floating-charge realisations under the Insolvency Act 1986 (Prescribed Part) Order 2003, divided pari passu across every unsecured creditor on the register.
Each of these is a parsed AM02 from Companies House. Click through to the per-company page for the full breakdown and the link to the original PDF on Companies House.
Total declared deficiency £127m. Assets available to unsecured creditors £254k. Shortfall to unsecured creditors £127m. The UK arm of an African clean-cooking energy business; shows how a multinational venture-backed failure looks on the form.
Total declared deficiency £4.9m. Assets to unsecured creditors £10k. Shortfall to unsecured creditors £2.96m. A typical mid-sized administration: assets are thin, the gap to the unsecured class is most of the picture.
Total declared deficiency £1.09m. Assets to unsecured creditors negative £650k. The unsecured class is owed £1.05m more than the company can pay. Shows the pattern where preferential and floating-charge claims absorb everything and unsecured creditors are left with the shortfall.
Total declared deficiency £799k. Assets to unsecured creditors £66.5k. The smaller end: a wholesale business where the administrator declared a sub-£1m gap and a five-figure pool potentially available to trade creditors.
Until the Statement of Affairs is filed, creditors only have the administrator's first letter. After it lands, you have a sworn figure for what the company is actually short. If the assets-for-unsecured line is zero and the total deficiency is large, you know what to write off; if it is positive and the deficiency is contained, your proof of debt is worth the postage.
Confirmed is free: add up to five customers or suppliers, and you get an email the day one of them goes into administration. Protect adds liquidation, strike-off, and the earlier warning signs, across an unlimited number of companies.