Every formal insolvency in England and Wales leaves a paper trail in one place: The Gazette. Winding-up petitions, appointment of liquidators and administrators, bankruptcy orders, notices to creditors — publication is a statutory requirement, and The Gazette is the official public record where it happens.
Which means insolvency professionals live in it. Verifying an appointment. Checking whether a notice actually published. Screening a director's name before taking an engagement. Confirming a bankruptcy before filing a claim. The record is all there.
The problem has never been whether the notices exist. The problem is how you search them.
The official search takes one query at a time
The Gazette's public search is built for a single question: one name, one company number, one keyword per query. Type it in, apply filters, read the results, and start again with the next name.
That works when you have one name. It stops working the moment you have a list — and insolvency work runs on lists. A creditor schedule with two hundred entries. A conflict check across every director of a group. A book of live cases that needs re-checking against this month's notices. At one query per name, a two-hundred-name list is an afternoon of copy-paste, and a re-check next month is the same afternoon again.
The Gazette knows this, which is why it offers two alternatives for anyone searching at volume — and both put a person or a sales process between you and the answer.
The Research Service is a manual search performed by The Gazette's own staff. You fill in a form, email or post it in, and their team searches the archive and sends back a PDF. The published rates start at £30 for a single name, £24 per name for two to five names, and £20 per name for six to ten. At those prices, screening a hundred-name creditor schedule is a four-figure invoice — for a search you'd want to repeat whenever the case moves.
The Data Service is a subscription for bespoke data feeds, sold through a sales conversation with contact-for-pricing terms and reports delivered on a daily, weekly or monthly cycle. It's built for institutions with a standing data requirement, not for a practitioner who needs answers on a specific list today.
One search at a time, a manual service by post, or a sales-led subscription. That's the gap Gazette Search was built to close.
Bulk search: the whole list, one pass, seconds
Gazette Search does one thing The Gazette's own tools don't: it lets you search many names at once, yourself, immediately.
Upload a spreadsheet — CSV or Excel — of names or company numbers. The engine runs every entry against the notice record in a single pass and comes back in seconds with a clean split: matched, with the notices found against each entry, and not found. No request form, no waiting on a research team, no procurement conversation. Pay as you go, per search, and only ever for the list you actually ran.
The difference is not marginal. It's the difference between "block out Thursday afternoon" and "done before the kettle boils." And because the search is self-serve and priced per use, re-running the same list next month — the part manual services quietly make unaffordable — is just another upload.
Where this lands in real insolvency work
Creditor and claims verification. Before admitting claims or distributing, run the full schedule of creditors in one pass rather than spot-checking the large ones and hoping.
Conflict and engagement checks. Screening every director and connected individual of a prospective appointment against the insolvency record used to be the intern's least favourite job. Now it's an upload.
Caseload re-screening. Positions change. A monthly re-run of your live-matter list against fresh notices catches the bankruptcy order or winding-up petition you'd otherwise learn about from the other side.
Pre-transaction screening. Lending against, buying from, or contracting with a counterparty group? Run every entity and principal in one search instead of choosing which ones are "worth checking."
The volume argument: this is not getting smaller
The caseload behind those notices keeps growing. In June 2026 alone, 11,871 individuals entered insolvency in England and Wales — up 16% on June 2025 — alongside 1,845 registered company insolvencies. IVAs hit 7,318 in the month, the highest monthly figure since November 2022, and now make up 58% of all individual insolvencies over the past year. Over the twelve months to June 2026, roughly one in 198 companies on the register entered insolvency.
Every one of those events generates notices. The more names in your world — creditors, directors, debtors, counterparties — the worse the one-query-at-a-time model gets, and the more the maths favours searching the whole list at once.
What it costs
Gazette Search is pay-as-you-go: buy search credits, use them when you need them, no subscription and no minimum. Volume pricing brings the per-search cost down to a small fraction of what a manual research request costs per name — the current per-search rates are on the pricing page.
For comparison: at The Gazette's published Research Service rates, ten names cost £200 and arrive as a PDF when the team completes them. The same ten names through a bulk search cost pennies each and come back before you've finished writing the file note.
Try it on your own list — no signup
The fastest way to evaluate a search tool is to search something you already know the answer to. The demo panel on the Gazette Search homepage takes a pasted list and returns matches in seconds — no account, no card, no sales call.
Paste in a handful of names from a current matter. If the results are right, you've found your new workflow. If a name you expected doesn't come back, you've lost thirty seconds.
Frequently asked questions
What notices can I search?
UK insolvency notices as published in The Gazette — the official public record for corporate and personal insolvency events in the United Kingdom.
How is this different from searching The Gazette directly?
The Gazette's own search accepts one query at a time. Gazette Search accepts an entire list — a CSV or Excel upload of names or company numbers — and searches every entry in one pass, self-serve, with results in seconds.
Do I need a subscription?
No. Pricing is pay-as-you-go credits. You buy what you need and use it when you need it.
Can I try it before creating an account?
Yes. The homepage demo panel runs a real search on a pasted list with no signup.
Is my uploaded list stored or shared?
Your list is used to run your search. See the privacy policy for full details on data handling.