Building on Companies House Data: The Gaps Nobody Warns You About

The UK register is the one most data teams treat as solved. It is free, it has an API, and it has published beneficial ownership since 2016. That reputation is now doing real damage — because Companies House is halfway through the largest rebuild in its history, and two of the changes alter what your UK data actually means.

The first lands in November 2026, when every director and person with significant control on the register must be identity-verified. The second lands on 1 April 2028, when small companies start filing a profit and loss account they can choose not to publish.

One of those makes UK data better. The other makes part of it disappear. This guide covers how the register works, what you can pull and how, where it stops, and what to plan for. Everything here is sourced from Companies House and GOV.UK primary material, with secondary sources named where used.

What Companies House is, and what makes it unusual

Companies House is the UK registrar of companies and an executive agency of the Department for Business and Trade. It registers every corporate body formed under the Companies Act 2006 across three jurisdictions — England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland — and publishes almost all of it free of charge.

Two features make it genuinely different from most of Europe. Company accounts are public for companies of every size, which is not true in Germany’s neighbourhood to nearly the same degree and is flatly not true in Switzerland. And beneficial ownership has been publicly readable since 2016, which the EU no longer offers after the 2022 CJEU ruling closed public access across the bloc — covered in our guide to which countries publish UBO data.

That openness is the reason UK data underpins so many cross-border products. It is also why a change to the UK register propagates further than a change almost anywhere else.

Reading the register statistics without being misled

Before anything else, a warning about the most recent quarter, because it will quietly corrupt any UK trend model built this year.

Companies House online services were unavailable between 12 and 16 June 2026 and strike-off processing was paused. June recorded 27,717 strike-offs against 66,206 in April and 62,592 in May, while incorporations held at 63,137. Net register change for June was +35,970, against +1,405 in April and −36 in May.

Read as an economic series, that looks like a formation boom. It is an operational backlog. This is the same class of error as the Swiss insolvency spike of 2025 — a register artefact wearing the clothes of a market signal.

Legal forms, and what a company number tells you

Two pieces of housekeeping that decide whether your matching works. The register is not only private limited companies, and the company number is not an opaque key — it encodes jurisdiction and, often, entity type.

The company number

Every entity gets a company registration number (CRN) at incorporation. It never changes, even when the name does, which makes it the only reliable join key for UK data. It is always eight characters: either eight digits, or a two-letter prefix followed by six digits.

Legal forms on the register

What is actually in a UK company record

What is free, and what actually costs money

The most useful thing to understand about Companies House pricing is the direction of the charge. Reading the register is free. You pay to file, and you pay for certification. There is no paywall on company data, no subscription tier, and no premium data product held back from the public.

That is unusual and it is worth saying plainly, because vendors sometimes imply otherwise. Company profiles, officers, PSC entries, filing histories, charges, insolvency records and every set of annual accounts are free to view and free to download, individually or in bulk, with no account beyond an API key.

Free

Paid

Fees rose on 1 February 2026, in some cases steeply, to fund the registrar’s expanded ECCTA powers and the Insolvency Service’s enforcement work. Companies House operates on cost recovery rather than profit.

Searching the register in practice

The public service is at Find and update company information. Six things separate a lookup that stands up in a file from one that does not.

1. Search by number, not name. Names change, are reused after dissolution, and differ by a comma. The CRN does not.
2. Read the status before the content. A dissolved company still returns full results, and its last accounts still render normally.
3. Check the officer verification field. New since 18 November 2025, and the fastest read on whether a record is government-checked or self-declared.
4. Open the filing history, not just the profile. The profile is the current state. The filing history is how it got there — officer churn, registered office moves, charge activity and period changes are all visible there and nowhere else.
5. Download the confirmation statement for shareholders. It is the only route to member data, and it is a document, not a field.
6. Treat the registered office as an address, not a location. It is where post goes. It is frequently a formation agent, an accountant, or a mailbox shared with thousands of other companies.

Company status, and the phrase that misleads everyone

Identity verification: the November 2026 deadline

This is the most consequential change to UK company data quality since the PSC register launched.

Identity verification became a legal requirement on 18 November 2025. Companies House is explicit that this was not a deadline but the start of a 12-month transition. The rules break down as follows.

Verification runs either directly through GOV.UK One Login or through an Authorised Corporate Service Provider — an AML-supervised firm such as a formation agent, solicitor or accountant. Checks by an ACSP must meet the same standard as direct verification. Companies House states that non-compliance is an offence carrying a financial penalty, and that you will not be able to make any filings for your company or start a new company.

It is also worth being precise about what the register was before. Companies House has been removing bad data at scale since gaining its new powers on 4 March 2024. By January 2025 it reported removing 60,700 suspicious or inappropriate registered office addresses, 47,200 officer addresses and 42,900 PSC addresses, redacting 40,300 incorporation documents and removing 9,500 documents — work that touched 75,600 companies. That is a large clean-up, and it is a reminder of how much needed cleaning.

The PSC register, and the point where it stops

The UK created the world’s first public beneficial ownership register in 2016 and it remains one of the most open. It also has a structural limit that is widely misunderstood, and it is not a data quality problem — it is the design.

Where a company’s immediate parent is a UK-registered entity that files its own PSC information — a Relevant Legal Entity — the company need only name that parent. It is not obliged to trace ownership further up. If the chain then leaves the UK, the ultimate beneficial owner may not appear anywhere on the register.

This is precisely why the Money Laundering Regulations 2017 state that obliged entities do not satisfy their obligations by relying only on the PSC register, and why FATF guidance points to using several sources rather than one.

The other three limitations

• Ownership is banded, not exact. Control is recorded as ranges rather than precise percentages, which makes aggregation of interests across several holders difficult to detect.
• Coverage is incomplete. Open Ownership’s 2025 analysis found a substantial share of PSC data potentially unreliable, including around 20% of entries naming no individual beneficial owner — a mixture of legitimate exemptions, non-compliance and deliberate concealment.
• Nominees are invisible on their face. A named individual PSC may be acting on instruction, and the register has no field that reveals it.

Shareholder and UBO access: what you can actually get

Three different questions get collapsed into one here, and they have three different answers. Who legally owns the shares. Who ultimately controls the company. And which of those you can retrieve without asking anyone’s permission.

The UK is still an outlier, and that is worth stating

UK beneficial ownership is free, public and machine-readable, with no licence and no legitimate-interest test. Since the 2022 CJEU ruling closed public UBO access across the EU, that puts the UK in a small group. If your compliance workflow assumes European-style gated access, you are doing unnecessary work on UK entities — and if it assumes UK-style open access everywhere else, it will break at the Channel.

The practical shape of a UK ownership answer, then, is layered: PSC for the control picture, the confirmation statement for the legal shareholder list, TR-1 notifications where the entity is listed, the Overseas Entities register where UK property is involved, and overseas registries wherever the chain leaves the country. No single one of those is the answer, and none of them costs anything.

The register of members: a quiet step backwards

Almost all of ECCTA pushes UK data towards the public record. One change goes the other way, and it is easy to miss because it looks like housekeeping.

Since 30 June 2016 a private company could elect to keep its register of members centrally at Companies House instead of maintaining it locally. For companies that took the option, shareholder data sat on the public register rather than in a filing cabinet. That election has now been removed: companies must keep their own register of members at their registered office or a single alternative inspection location, and those that held it centrally have to bring it back in-house.

Take-up of the central option was reportedly low, so the volume of affected companies is small. The direction matters more than the volume. Put beside the 2028 profit and loss opt-out, it is the second instance in the same reform programme of UK company data moving from public to private — in a register whose entire international reputation rests on doing the opposite.

Accounts: the UK’s strongest asset, and the 2028 change

Every UK company files annual accounts and they are free to download. Against Switzerland, where a private company publishes nothing, or the patchwork across the EU, this is the single best financial-data proposition of any major register.

The qualifier is depth. Small and micro-entity companies currently file reduced information and are not required to put a profit and loss account on the public record.

Private companies: what you get

The digitisation gap nobody advertises

The second qualifier is more practical, and it is the one that breaks projects. Not all UK accounts are machine-readable. A substantial share arrive as PDFs — documents with no structured tagging behind them.

The consequence for a build is straightforward. An accounts pipeline that reads only tagged filings will silently return nothing for a large slice of the register, and that slice skews towards the largest filers. Closing it means document extraction — layout parsing, table reconstruction, validation against filing metadata — which is a different discipline from consuming an API.

Public companies: a completely different disclosure regime

Everything above describes private companies. For a company with securities admitted to trading, Companies House stops being the main source and becomes the least informative one — and almost every team that builds a UK pipeline forgets to model the difference.

What changes on 1 April 2028

Companies House has confirmed three changes, with 21 months’ notice given:

1. Software-only filing. All accounts filed on or after 1 April 2028 must be submitted through commercial software in iXBRL. The web and paper routes close for accounts, though they remain open for other statutory filings.
2. Small and micro-entity P&L becomes mandatory to file. Micro-entities will file a balance sheet, auditor’s report unless exempt, and profit and loss account. Small companies will file the same plus a directors’ report. Abridged accounts are abolished.
3. Audit exemption requires an enhanced statement. Directors must specify which exemption is claimed and confirm the company qualifies, on the balance sheet.

One further change: companies will be limited in how often they can shorten an accounting reference period, needing a business reason to do so more than once in five years. Frequent period-shortening has long been a signal worth watching in UK data, and it is about to become rarer and more meaningful.

Deadlines, penalties and disqualification

Filing compliance is free risk signal sitting in the register, and most teams pull the accounts without ever reading whether they arrived on time.

Late accounts attract an automatic penalty on a sliding scale. For a private company: £150 up to one month late, £375 for one to three months, £750 for three to six, and £1,500 beyond six months. Public company penalties are higher. The penalty doubles if accounts are late two years running, and not filing accounts or a confirmation statement is a criminal offence for which directors can be personally fined.

Disqualified directors

Companies House maintains a register of disqualified directors, and disqualification undertakings arise from Insolvency Service investigations. Two practical points. First, it is a separate dataset from the officer record — a director appointment does not carry a disqualification flag. Second, and more awkward for engineering, disqualification events are not carried on the Streaming API, so a real-time mirror built on the stream will not learn about them. They have to be polled separately.

The Register of Overseas Entities

A separate UK register, created by the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Act 2022, and frequently missed because it does not sit inside the companies register.

Overseas entities that own UK land must register with Companies House and declare their beneficial owners. Registered entities receive an Overseas Entity ID, which the land registries require before a qualifying disposition can be registered — so the register has real enforcement teeth attached to property transactions rather than to filing penalties alone.

Two changes matter for data work. Entities have been able to apply to protect trust member details since 28 February 2025 where they meet the criteria. And since 31 August 2025, trust information held on the register is available on request rather than being entirely closed — a narrower opening than full publication, but a real one.

There is no group structure in the data

This one deserves stating plainly, because it is assumed to exist far more often than it does.

Companies House registers entities. It does not model groups. There is no parent field, no subsidiary field, no ultimate-parent field and no group identifier anywhere in the company record, the API or the bulk products. Two companies in the same group are, as far as the register is concerned, two unrelated records that happen to share some officers.

Group structure has to be reconstructed, and no single source yields it:

• PSC entries give upward links, one level at a time, subject to the limits above.
• Consolidated accounts of a parent often list subsidiaries — in the notes, as text, in a PDF. Which runs straight back into the digitisation problem.
• Charge documents name co-obligors and group guarantors, and are frequently the only place a sister-company relationship surfaces at all.
• Overseas registries pick the chain up where it leaves the UK, in jurisdictions that publish shareholders.
• Shared officers and addresses give candidate links, not confirmed ones. Useful as a signal, dangerous as a conclusion.

This matters commercially more than any other gap on this page. Exposure is almost never to a single company — it is to a group. Credit limits, concentration risk, sanctions exposure and beneficial ownership all resolve at group level, and the UK register answers none of it.

Getting UK company data at scale

For how the UK compares on API availability, see our map of registry API access by country — free programmatic access of this quality remains rare. Identifier formats for cross-border matching are in the company registration number format guide, and UK VAT numbers are covered in the VAT format checker.

Blind spots worth planning around

What to watch

• The 29 October 2026 statistics release. Companies House previously indicated that companies failing to submit identity verification statements with their confirmation statements would begin appearing in the removals data. The April–June release did not break that out. October is the next opportunity, and it lands three weeks before the transition closes.
• The opt-out mechanism for small-company P&L. Unresolved, and it determines how much UK financial data stays public after April 2028.
• Slippage. Filer verification has moved more than once and now sits at no earlier than November 2027. Treat every future ECCTA date as an earliest date.
• Divergence from the EU. The UK keeps public beneficial ownership while the EU tightens legitimate-interest access under AMLD6 and the AML Regulation. If you operate both sides, your access model has to be different on each — see also BRIS alternatives for the EU side.

Frequently asked questions