The right question to ask before trusting any data source.

FrictionIndex showed Real Estate stress rising sharply over a two-week window in early March 2026. Construction had been building since early February. By 23 March both sectors were simultaneously elevated — Real Estate at its highest reading in the dataset, Construction at a multi-month peak. The UK index reached its highest level since 2022.

The Insolvency Service's March 2026 release — published 17 April, seven weeks after the stress first appeared in our data — confirmed the episode: "more than 100 connected companies in the Real Estate sector entering administration" drove an unusual spike in formal insolvency volumes. Construction insolvencies rose 14% in March versus February. The official data confirmed what FrictionIndex had been showing in real time.

The official publication date was 17 April. FrictionIndex was showing the stress from the first week of March. That's a 45-day lead on published confirmation of a significant market event.

The UK FrictionIndex crossed above its baseline on 7 February 2022 and kept climbing. By 28 February — the week Russia invaded Ukraine — it had reached its highest level of the episode. It remained elevated for 28 consecutive weeks. It was the most sustained above-baseline reading in the UK index since the financial crisis.

The period produced documented stress across multiple sectors simultaneously: Bulb Energy's administration (the largest energy supplier failure in UK history at the time), P&O Ferries' sudden dismissal of 800 crew and subsequent administration proceedings, a surge in construction and hospitality failures as energy costs hit margins, and the beginning of the cost-of-living crisis that would drive insolvency volumes to multi-year highs through 2023 and 2024.

This wasn't one event — it was a macro environment. FrictionIndex tracks that environment in aggregate, every week, before the statistics catch up. The 28-week sustained reading told a clear story about where the UK economy was heading months before the official insolvency data confirmed it.

The Energy sector index started climbing in mid-February 2018 from a near-normal baseline. By April it had more than doubled. By May it was running at more than twice that level again. It peaked in June and remained elevated until August — a six-month episode of sustained above-baseline filing activity across energy businesses.

The UK domestic energy market experienced a wave of supplier failures through 2018: Iresa Energy (July), Extra Energy (November), and several smaller suppliers across the year. Ofgem later cited the period as a systemic stress event in the retail energy market, eventually leading to the Supplier of Last Resort regime being invoked multiple times. The FrictionIndex energy reading was tracking the underlying Gazette activity that preceded and accompanied each failure.

The index was running at two to three times normal levels for months before the wave of publicly announced collapses. The filing activity was there. The confirmations came later.

The Transport sector index began climbing in mid-July 2017. By 14 August it had already reached three times normal levels. It kept climbing through August and into September. For seven consecutive weeks, filing activity across the entire Transport sector was running at between three and six times its historical baseline.

Monarch Airlines — the UK's fifth-largest carrier — collapsed on 2 October 2017. 110,000 passengers were stranded abroad. The Civil Aviation Authority launched the largest peacetime repatriation in UK history. The Insolvency Service later confirmed widespread distress across the broader transport and logistics sector throughout this period.

Monarch wasn't the cause of the index reading. It was the most visible consequence of an environment FrictionIndex had been tracking for weeks. The stress was real and broad — Monarch was the name that made the news.

Construction stress first broke above baseline in late October 2011 and never fully recovered for 89 consecutive weeks. By December it was running at more than three times normal levels. By March 2012 it had more than doubled again. It peaked in May 2012 — nearly ten times normal filing activity — and remained at several multiples of baseline for most of the following year.

This was the most sustained sector stress episode in our data since 2007. The period saw hundreds of construction company failures including the collapse of major contractors, subcontractor chains, and housebuilders across England and Wales. The Insolvency Service's own construction statistics for 2012 and 2013 confirmed it as one of the worst periods for the sector in a generation. The stress was not concentrated in a single firm or event — it was structural, widespread, and prolonged.

No single company explains a reading of 932. What this shows is that the entire sector was under extraordinary pressure for nearly two years. Any lender with material construction exposure during this period was operating in a fundamentally different risk environment — and the weekly data was showing that in real time.

On 18 April 2011, the Health & Social Work sector index quadrupled in a single week — a fourfold increase against its own baseline. It held at those levels for six consecutive weeks before easing briefly, then resumed climbing through the autumn, reaching its highest point in December.

Southern Cross Healthcare — the UK's largest care home operator, running 750 homes and caring for 31,000 residents — announced in May 2011 that it could no longer meet its rent obligations. It entered a managed wind-down over the summer. The collapse triggered a national crisis in adult social care and a parliamentary inquiry. Gazette activity across the care sector remained elevated for the rest of the year as the ripple effects spread through smaller operators.

The index jumped six weeks before Southern Cross made its public announcement. What it was tracking was the underlying filing activity across the whole sector — Southern Cross was the largest institution caught in an environment that was already deteriorating.