How Companies House works
Companies House has run an open register since 22 June 2015, when it made its entire digital record free: accounts, directors, charges, and full filing history, for every company, throughout its life. That is the inverse of most US states — there is no paid tier standing between you and the officers, beneficial owners, or accounts. The free public service, Find and update company information, held 5,427,787 companies as of 31 March 2025 — 4,872,293 once you exclude the ones winding down through dissolution or liquidation — and was accessed over 16.5 billion times in 2023–24.
Companies House is an executive agency of the Department for Business and Trade. Every company carries a company number from the certificate of incorporation — the stable lookup key — and one of a short list of statuses: Active, Dissolved, Liquidation, In Administration, Receiver Action, Voluntary Arrangement, Insolvency Proceedings, Converted / Closed. A second field, the status detail, refines the headline status: an Active company can still carry Active proposal to strike off, the single most useful early-warning flag in UK KYB — the company is live today, but the registrar has started removing it.
The register covers private limited companies (LTD), public limited companies (PLC), limited liability partnerships (LLP), companies limited by guarantee, limited partnerships, and private unlimited companies. The field that matters most for compliance is people with significant control (PSC) — the UK's beneficial-ownership record. A PSC is anyone who holds more than 25% of shares or voting rights, can appoint or remove a majority of directors, or otherwise exercises significant control. Since 18 November 2025, Companies House maintains the PSC register centrally, and it is public. BizVerify returns all of this as one normalized response, in the same shape as every other jurisdiction.
What the UK specifically charges and requires
Incorporation
Companies House fees rose on 1 February 2026. The headline filings a developer models around:
| Filing | Fee |
|---|---|
| Incorporation (digital) | £100 |
| Incorporation (same-day, software) | £156 |
| Incorporation (paper) | £124 |
| Confirmation statement (digital) | £50 |
| Confirmation statement (paper) | £110 |
| Voluntary strike-off (digital) | £13 |
| Voluntary strike-off (paper) | £18 |
Annual obligations
Every UK company — including dormant and non-trading ones — must file a confirmation statement at least once every 12 months, confirming the registrar's data is current. Miss it and Companies House can levy a financial penalty of up to £5,000 and strike the company off.
Annual accounts are the second obligation. A private company's first accounts are due 21 months after the date it registered; thereafter, accounts are due 9 months after the financial year ends. Late accounts draw an automatic penalty that escalates with delay: £150 up to a month late, £375 at one to three months, £750 at three to six months, and £1,500 beyond six months — doubled if the company files late two years running.
What this means for verification
A UK company can read Active and still be heading off the register. A missed confirmation statement or overdue accounts triggers Active proposal to strike off in the status detail; persistent non-filing ends in Dissolved. The status and status-detail fields together are how you catch that drift before it closes.
Common ways developers use UK verification
Verify-before-act in an AI agent
An agent doing supplier onboarding or M&A research is handed a UK company name from a CRM field. Before it drafts outreach or moves money, it calls verify_business({ entity_name, jurisdiction: "gb" }) through the BizVerify MCP server. A Dissolved result, or an Active proposal to strike off detail, routes the task to a human instead of auto-approving. The same call runs from Claude Code, LangChain, or a CrewAI crew.
Beneficial-ownership checks for KYB and AML
AML and KYB tooling needs to know who actually controls a counterparty, not just that the company exists. Deep verification for the UK returns the people with significant control — anyone over the 25% shares-or-voting threshold — alongside officers and the registered office. The structured PSC list is what your beneficial-ownership checks reconcile against, with no separate ownership-data vendor in the loop.
Marketplace seller onboarding
A marketplace onboarding UK-based sellers confirms each company reads Active — not Dissolved, and not carrying an Active proposal to strike off detail — before enabling payouts. A quick check is one credit and fast enough to sit inline in a signup flow. Run it through n8n or Zapier and you write the integration once for the UK and every other jurisdiction you cover.
Due-diligence and company-profile enrichment
Procurement, lending, and vendor-risk tools build a company profile from a name or company number. Deep verification for the UK returns incorporation date, SIC codes, officers, filing history, charges, and the date the next accounts are due — the fields a KYB pipeline hangs a profile on. Both the company number and the registered office come back, so downstream systems reconcile on whichever key they store.
Frequently asked questions
How current is UK company data?
Status reflects the Companies House record at the time the check runs — no nightly snapshots, no stale cache between the source and your response. Changes show up within seconds of the registrar updating. The trade-off: our p95 latency tracks the registry's own responsiveness, so a slow morning at Companies House is a slow morning for you.
What does deep verification add over a quick check for the UK?
A quick check returns the company name, type, company number, and status — enough to confirm a UK company exists and is Active. Deep verification adds the people with significant control (PSC), officers, registered office, incorporation date, SIC codes, filing history, charges, and the date the next accounts are due. Use quick on the hot path; deep when you need the full record or beneficial ownership.
Can I get beneficial-ownership (PSC) data for a UK company?
Yes. People with significant control is part of the public UK register, and deep verification returns the structured PSC list: each person or entity over the 25% shares-or-voting-rights threshold, anyone who can appoint or remove a majority of directors, and anyone with other significant control. It's the field that makes the UK strong for AML — beneficial ownership without bolting on a second data vendor.
What does Active proposal to strike off mean?
It's a status detail on an otherwise Active company: the company is live today, but the registrar has begun the process to remove it from the register — usually after a missed confirmation statement or overdue accounts. Treat it as a soft fail. The company can still be saved if it files what it owes, but it's drifting toward Dissolved. It's the earliest reliable warning in UK KYB.
Do dissolved UK companies still appear in search?
Yes. Companies House keeps dissolved companies on the public record, and a lookup returns them with status Dissolved. That's usually what you want — confirming a counterparty handed you a real-but-dead company is as useful as confirming a live one. The Liquidation, In Administration, and Receiver Action statuses sit between Active and Dissolved for companies in an insolvency process.
Do I get charged for a UK company that doesn't exist?
A confirmed "no match" still counts as a quick check (1 credit, ~$0.08 on public pricing) — the verification ran and proved the company isn't on the register. Hard errors from the registry side (timeouts, 5xx) don't consume credits.