In March 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom, Berkeley said that coronavirus had cost it £80m in just six weeks and began shutting down most of its sites, having earlier cancelled a £455m shareholder payout. In June 2020, the company announced it was consulting on up to 200 redundancies, and revealed its pre-tax profits were down 35% partly due to the COVID-19 impact, with falls in sales and revenues. As a result of pandemic, the company pushed back payment of £455m to shareholders by two years.