What Happens When Your Broker Closes — Protecting Your Tax Records

Your broker going bust is unlikely — but not impossible. More importantly, even healthy brokers change platforms, merge, or simply delete old data. Your CGT obligations don’t care about any of that. You need the records regardless.

FSCS protection — your money is safe (mostly)

The Financial Services Compensation Scheme protects up to £85,000 per person per firm for investment claims. This covers situations where a regulated firm fails and can’t return your assets — fraud, insolvency, or administrative failure.

Crucially, your shares are usually held in a nominee account separate from the broker’s own assets. If the broker goes bust, your shares should be identifiable and transferable to another broker. They don’t disappear with the company. The FCA’s firm failure guidance explains the process.

But your transaction history might disappear

Here’s the real risk. When a broker closes or is acquired, the transaction history — the CSV data you need for CGT calculations — may not survive the transition. You need your original buy dates and prices to calculate the cost basis for shares you still hold. Without them, you’re guessing.

Some real examples: when a broker migrates to a new platform, historical transaction data sometimes doesn’t make the move. When a firm is wound down by administrators, the IT systems may be shut off before clients have downloaded everything. Even healthy brokers typically only retain 3-7 years of downloadable history.

How to protect yourself

Download your full transaction history at least once a year. Save the CSV to your computer and to cloud storage. Don’t rely on the broker keeping it accessible. See our record-keeping guide for what to save.

Save contract notes. The PDF confirmations for each trade are your primary evidence. Most brokers make these available in an archive section of your account — download them before they’re purged.

Use TaxBull’s session save. After running your CGT calculation on TaxBull, download the session as a JSON file. This contains your complete transaction list, exchange rates, stock splits, ERI entries, and calculation results. You can reload it years later — even if the broker data is long gone.

Keep records across multiple brokers independently. If you trade on three platforms, you need CSVs from all three. Don’t assume the surviving brokers will have information about trades on the one that closed.

If you’ve already lost records

If you need historical data and the broker can’t provide it, try:

Bank statements showing the transaction amounts (won’t have per-share prices but better than nothing).
Email confirmations of trades (many brokers send email alerts).
The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine — in rare cases, broker statement pages have been cached.
Contacting the FCA or FSCS if the firm was wound down — administrators sometimes maintain access to records during the wind-down period.

As a last resort, HMRC may accept a reasonable estimate of cost basis — for example, using historical share prices from the London Stock Exchange’s historic prices or Yahoo Finance for the dates you believe you purchased. But “reasonable estimate” requires you to demonstrate genuine effort to find the records — not just a guess.

This is general information. If your broker has closed and you need specific advice about recovering records or filing, contact HMRC or a qualified accountant.