Bankrupting someone costs £1,852 before you start. Nine times in ten it returns nothing.

No, and this is the single most common misconception in creditor recovery — usefully, it is wrong in your favour. There are two routes to establishing that a debtor cannot pay. The first is a statutory demand: you serve it, three weeks pass, and if the demand is neither complied with nor set aside you may present a petition. No judgment is required for that route at any point. The second is that execution on a judgment has been returned unsatisfied — which obviously does require a judgment, and which lets you skip the demand entirely if a warrant or writ has already failed. So the choice is strategic rather than procedural. The demand route is faster and costs no court fee, because a statutory demand is not a court document. But the debt has never been judicially tested, so the debtor’s entire defence is available to them on a set-aside application, and you carry the full abuse-of-process risk. The judgment route costs an issue fee and takes longer, but produces a debt that cannot be re-argued — a debtor attacking a judgment-debt demand has to attack the judgment itself, which is a far harder thing to do. The practitioner rule of thumb is worth adopting: if the debt is even arguably disputable, get judgment first.

£352 court fee and a £1,500 deposit to the Official Receiver, so £1,852 unavoidable before anybody does any work. Add a process server for personal service of the demand and then the petition, at roughly £100 to £250 each, and solicitors’ costs to draft and attend, and the realistic all-in figure to obtain a bankruptcy order is £3,500 to £6,000. Two warnings on the figures themselves: live pages at established insolvency firms still quote a £990 deposit and a £280 court fee, which have both been wrong for years, and one widely-ranking aggregator is wrong in the other direction. Now the part people skip. The official position on the deposit is that it is returned to whoever paid it “save to the extent that the assets are insufficient to discharge the Official Receiver’s fee”. In a no-asset estate — which is the ordinary case — the assets are insufficient, so you do not get it back. Your costs as petitioning creditor rank as an expense of the bankruptcy, which sounds like a priority and is one, in a queue containing nothing. Treat both the deposit and your costs as money spent, not money lent, and you will make better decisions.

Probably not, and we would rather say so than sell you a petition. The reason is arithmetic, not luck. On a creditor’s petition the Official Receiver charges a general fee of £7,200 and an administration fee of £3,300, and those come out of the estate first. Then the deposit repayment, then your costs, then the trustee’s remuneration, then preferential creditors. Ordinary unsecured creditors come after all of it. So an estate has to realise somewhere around £12,000 to £15,000 before you see a penny, and most consumer bankruptcy estates realise a fraction of that. On the evidence: nobody publishes dividend rates for bankruptcies in England and Wales, which is itself telling. The best available UK data is the Insolvency Service’s own commissioned research into completed company liquidations, which found that ninety per cent of cases returned nothing at all to unsecured creditors, that the median return across all cases was zero, and that where a dividend was paid at all the median was nine pence in the pound after a median of nearly two years. Scottish personal insolvency statistics point the same way. Neither is a direct measurement of your case, and we are not going to pretend otherwise — but if you are petitioning in the expectation of a cheque, the evidence is against you.

Four situations, and outside them we would tell you not to. First, where there is real equity in property. That is the only scenario where the arithmetic survives the Official Receiver’s fees, and it is the one case where a petition is a recovery strategy rather than a threat. Second, where you suspect assets have been moved. A trustee in bankruptcy can unwind transactions at an undervalue and preferences, can attack transactions defrauding creditors, and can compel disclosure under oath. You as an individual creditor can do none of those things, and no amount of enforcement will get you there. If the debtor transferred the house to a spouse eighteen months ago, that is what a trustee is for. Third, where bankruptcy is career-ending for them — a company director, a solicitor or accountant, an FCA-authorised person, certain licence holders. There the threat is rational rather than empty, and the value is entirely in the twenty-one days before you present. Fourth, where you have a portfolio and are buying credibility across it: a landlord or lender with many debtors may rationally accept a loss on one case to establish that they follow through. Against an asset-less individual with nothing to lose professionally, a petition converts a bad debt into a bad debt plus £1,852, and there is no version of that arithmetic that helps you.

It is the biggest risk on this page and it is entirely avoidable. Serving a statutory demand, or presenting a petition, on a genuinely disputed debt is an abuse of process — and the test is not whether you think the dispute is nonsense. It is whether it is arguable, and on a set-aside application the court does not try the dispute; it asks only whether there is a genuine triable issue. That is a low bar for the debtor. The consequences run in three directions. The demand is set aside with costs against you, and the debtor’s costs can comfortably exceed the debt you were chasing. The debtor can obtain an injunction restraining you from presenting a petition at all. And because it is characterised as an abuse of the process, courts award costs on the indemnity basis rather than the standard basis, which means you pay far more of them. The same applies where the debtor has a genuine cross-claim or set-off that would bring the net figure below the threshold — a builder chasing an invoice from a client who says the work was defective is exactly the fact pattern that produces this outcome. If there is any history of dispute, in writing or otherwise, issue a money claim instead. On a five-figure debt that is a few hundred pounds well spent.

Different regime, and there is an asymmetry worth knowing. The company threshold is still £750 — it has never been raised — while the individual threshold went to £5,000 in 2015. So a limited company can be wound up on a debt seven times smaller than the one needed to bankrupt a person. The COVID-era temporary threshold of £10,000 has expired. The costs are higher: £352 court fee and a £2,600 deposit rather than £1,500, plus a mandatory advertisement in the London Gazette, which must be published at least seven clear business days after service on the company and not less than seven clear business days before the hearing. Getting that window wrong gets the petition adjourned or struck out with wasted costs, and it catches people out regularly. The Official Receiver’s fees on a compulsory liquidation are higher too. Everything said above about dividends applies with more force, because the Insolvency Service’s ninety per cent nil-return finding is corporate data. Where winding up genuinely bites is on a trading company that needs its bank account and its reputation — the pressure of an advertised petition is real in a way that a demand to an individual often is not.

A writ of control, if you have a judgment over £600 that does not arise under a regulated consumer credit agreement. It costs £82 to seal, it is the fastest route on this page — days to weeks rather than months — and here is the part people do not realise: if the enforcement agent recovers nothing, the compliance stage fee of about £79 plus VAT is all you have added to your loss. The rest of the enforcement fees are recovered from the debtor, not from you. Compare that downside with £1,852 non-refundable for a petition. Two caveats. It needs somewhere to go and something to find, so it works well against a debtor with goods or a vehicle at a known address and poorly against one without. And if the debtor pays you directly after you have instructed, the enforcement fees are still due and you have to collect or absorb them. After that: a charging order at £139 if they own property, which secures the debt rather than producing cash; an attachment of earnings at £139, slow but steady against an employed debtor; and a third party debt order at £139, which is binary — it catches whatever is in the account at the exact moment the interim order reaches the bank, and an empty account means you have spent the fee and told them you are coming.

Two things, and both are missed regularly. A Breathing Space is an absolute bar. If the debtor is protected under the Debt Respite Scheme you cannot present a petition while it is in force, and steps taken during one can be undone. A standard breathing space runs sixty days; a mental health crisis moratorium runs for the duration of the treatment plus thirty days. This is not a discretion the court exercises — it is a bar, and checking costs nothing. The other is the nature of the debt. A petition needs a liquidated sum: a fixed, ascertained amount. Damage to a property, losses you would have to prove, anything a court would need to assess — none of those qualify however confident you are about the figure, and a statutory demand on an unliquidated claim invites a set-aside with costs. Assessed or agreed costs are a liquidated sum; whether an unassessed costs order qualifies is contested ground and we would not build a petition on it. A fully secured debt cannot found a petition either unless you surrender the security or petition only for the unsecured balance — and that balance has to clear £5,000 on its own.

£145 for the search that decides everything: who the registered proprietor is, what charges sit against the title, and what equity is realistically behind them. It is the cheapest thing on this page and the only one that can tell you to stop, which is exactly why nobody leads with it. £295 to draft a statutory demand on the correct form and have it served properly, with a certificate of service that will survive scrutiny — defective service is one of the commonest reasons a petition is dismissed at the hearing with costs. £550 for a full pre-action pack: the debt evidenced and reconciled, the correspondence chronology, the asset position, and the competing-petition search, assembled so a regulated firm can act on it rather than bill you to build it. What we will not do is present the petition or appear at the hearing. Presenting a petition is issuing proceedings, which is conduct of litigation and a reserved legal activity, and in Baxter v Doble the High Court held that an unregulated firm doing the surrounding package of work amounted to conducting litigation even though the client was nominally acting in person — an offence carrying up to two years on indictment. So that part goes to a solicitor you instruct and pay directly. There is no margin in it for us, which is the point: it means we have no reason to steer you toward a petition when the honest answer is a writ of control for £82.