Construction companies in insolvency proceedings
The register publishes each company’s legal situation. This figure counts those whose code showed an insolvency proceeding under way on the day the register was read.
Legal situation as the register stated it on the read date.
That is 3.4% of the 208,558 construction companies on the register.
By trade
Each company is counted once, under its main activity class.
- Companies with legal personality
- Sole traders
- Construction of residential and non-residential buildings41.001,633 · 14.1% sole traders
- Other specialised construction activities n.e.c.43.99776 · 22.3% sole traders
- Electrical installation43.21679 · 21.4% sole traders
- Joinery installation43.32611 · 22.7% sole traders
- Site preparation43.12468 · 26.3% sole traders
- Other building completion and finishing43.35456 · 26.3% sole traders
- Plumbing, heat and air-conditioning installation43.22435 · 20% sole traders
- Roofing activities43.41395 · 28.4% sole traders
- Painting and glazing43.34264 · 33.3% sole traders
- Floor and wall covering43.33238 · 20.6% sole traders
- Other construction installation43.24225 · 24.9% sole traders
- Insulation work43.23215 · 28.4% sole traders
- Masonry and bricklaying43.91200 · 40.5% sole traders
- Plastering43.31176 · 23.3% sole traders
- Construction of roads and motorways42.11114 · 20.2% sole traders
- Construction of utility projects for electricity and telecommunications42.2282 · 14.6% sole traders
- Demolition43.1170 · 15.7% sole traders
- Other specialised construction activities in the construction of buildings43.4264 · 26.6% sole traders
6 categories (73 companies) are not broken out: they described a group of sole traders too small to stay anonymous.
By province
The province is derived from the seat’s postcode; the register does not publish it.
- Companies with legal personality
- Sole traders
- Antwerp1,197 · 18.2% sole traders
- East Flanders1,092 · 25.3% sole traders
- West Flanders796 · 36.2% sole traders
- Brussels-Capital Region771 · 18.3% sole traders
- Flemish Brabant760 · 15.8% sole traders
- Limburg711 · 17.2% sole traders
- Hainaut665 · 22.3% sole traders
- Liège534 · 24.2% sole traders
- Namur325 · 26.2% sole traders
- Walloon Brabant226 · 13.3% sole traders
- Luxembourg95 · 26.3% sole traders
2 companies have a postcode outside Belgium or one we could not read: they count in the national total, but in no province.
Dated observations
What we observed, and when — not a national count of bankruptcies.
| Period | Companies |
|---|---|
| 2026-08 | 2 |
| 2026-09 | 3 |
| 2026-10 | 5 |
Last observed: 11 Nov 2026
Common questions
- Is this the number of bankruptcies in Belgium?
- No. It is the number of construction companies whose register entry showed an open proceeding on the day it was read. A closed bankruptcy no longer appears, and an open proceeding is not necessarily a bankruptcy.
- Where are the companies concerned?
- Nowhere on this page. It gives totals only; no company is named, and categories too small to stay anonymous are removed from it.
Method and sources
Counted here are the companies whose main activity code falls under NACE divisions 41, 42, 43 — construction — in version 2025 of the classification.
Register read on 3 Nov 2026. The register publishes one full extract per month; these figures change at that pace and no faster.
Any category describing fewer than 10 sole traders is taken out of the breakdown: a count small enough points at one person, and these pages point at nobody. Removed categories are reported under the table they came from.
Province and region are derived from the seat’s postcode: the register publishes a commune and a postcode, not a province. That derivation is ours.
An open proceeding is not a declared bankruptcy, and this figure is not a count of the year’s bankruptcies: it is how many companies carried, on that day, a legal-situation code meaning a proceeding is running.
The list of codes treated as insolvency is deliberately short. A code not on it reads as "no proceeding", which makes this under-count rather than over-count — the only acceptable direction of error for an adverse statement.
Statbel, for its part, counts the bankruptcies declared by the enterprise courts, which is not the same measure: the figure above counts proceedings open on the register on the day it was read, Statbel’s counts judgments delivered over a period. In the figures published on 24 July 2026, construction totals 1,442 bankruptcies over the first six months of 2026 — 972 in the Flemish Region, 287 in the Walloon Region, 183 in the Brussels-Capital Region — and is not among the four sectors setting a half-year record there. March is the highest month of the half-year: the publication of 17 April 2026 counted 273 bankruptcies in construction, the highest figure for a month of March; the monthly detail, revised since, gives 275.
Reading the two series together means not adding them up. Statbel’s is a flow: it counts the judgments delivered during a month, then starts again from zero the following month. The one on this page is a state: it counts the companies carrying an open proceeding on the day the register was read, and it moves only when a proceeding opens or closes. A month of rising bankruptcies therefore does not mechanically raise this total in the same month — closures take away as much as openings add, and Statbel points out that a delay separates the halt in activity from the judgment.
Source: Crossroads Bank for Enterprises (KBO/BCE), FPS Economy — open data — re-use conditions
These figures describe what the public register said on the day we read it. They are counts, not a ranking: no commune, no trade and no company is presented here as better or worse than another.