UK ISA & peer to peer statistics

The ISA market is large, and mostly cash

The UK ISA market had one of its strongest years on record in 2023/24. HMRC's Annual Savings Statistics report around 15 million adult ISA accounts subscribed to in that tax year, up from about 12.4 million the year before, with roughly £103 billion paid in. Cash ISAs took the clear majority of subscriptions, helped by higher interest rates pulling savers back towards guaranteed returns.

By value, though, the picture flips: stocks & shares ISAs hold the larger share of total ISA wealth (around 59%), with cash around 41%. In short, most people put money into cash, but long-term value is concentrated in invested ISAs.

Where Innovative Finance ISAs sit

IFISAs are a very small corner of this market. They are newer (introduced in April 2016) and aimed at a narrower, risk-tolerant audience. Importantly, HMRC itself notes that its data on Innovative Finance ISAs has low reliability and a small sample size, so precise IFISA figures should be treated with caution. For context, in the early years after launch, only the order of tens of thousands of investors were subscribing to IFISAs each year, a fraction of the millions using cash and stocks & shares ISAs.

The takeaway is not that IFISAs are unimportant, but that they are a specialist, minority product, which is exactly why doing your own homework on each platform matters so much.

Typical peer-to-peer returns

There is no official, market-wide "P2P return" statistic, partly because outcomes vary so much by platform, loan type and economic conditions. In practice, UK platforms tend to advertise target rates in the region of 4% to 9%. These are targets, not guarantees: actual returns are reduced by bad debt and fees, and your capital is at risk.

Sources & caveats

ISA market figures are drawn from HM Revenue & Customs' Annual Savings Statistics, reflecting the 2023/24 tax year as most recently reported. Figures are rounded and may be revised by HMRC. IFISA-specific data is explicitly flagged by HMRC as having low reliability. Peer-to-peer return ranges are indicative of platform marketing, not a guaranteed or official figure. Nothing here is financial advice.