The Financial Conduct Authority has finalized a new UK short selling regime that extends reporting deadlines, shifts public disclosure to aggregated data, and simplifies exemption notifications.
The most immediate operational change is the reporting deadline. Firms will now have until 23:59 on T+1 to submit net short positions, giving compliance and operations teams more time to assemble accurate data across desks, custodians, and legal entities. The deadline was previously required earlier in the working day.
The FCA will replace individual net short position disclosures with aggregated net short position (ANSP) data at the company level. The regulator will publish combined positions from all firms at or above the 0.2% reporting threshold without identifying individual holders. This preserves market transparency on aggregate short interest while removing the competitive sensitivity of naming individual shorts at the old 0.5% public disclosure level.
That shift matters for issuers, competitors, and analysts who track short interest as a market signal. Transparency remains, but the identity of the individual holder moves out of public view.
Market maker exemptions and scope changes
Market makers can now rely on an annual attestation model instead of submitting notifications each time they adjust instruments covered by the exemption. Existing exemptions will require renotification during the transition to align with the new process.
The FCA is replacing the exempt shares list with a reportable shares list, identifying which instruments fall within scope of the reporting and covering regime. UK sovereign debt and credit default swaps are outside the new reporting framework, though the FCA retains emergency powers for those instruments in stressed conditions.
Firms need to prepare reporting systems, verify issued share capital calculations, confirm group reporting workflows, and align coverage against the reportable shares list ahead of 13 July 2026. The FCA has published a test copy of the reportable shares list in CSV and XLSX formats for technical planning.
