UK Company Register: How to Search Companies House and Verify UK Companies (2026)

1. How the UK company register works

Unlike Germany's ~150 court registers or Switzerland's 26 cantons, the UK has one register for everything. Companies House, an executive agency of the Department for Business and Trade, registers every company in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and publishes the full record: incorporation documents, annual accounts, officers, charges, and, since 2016, beneficial owners. Search and downloads have been free since 2015.

Two companions complete the picture: The Gazette (thegazette.co.uk), the official public record where insolvency notices appear such as winding-up petitions, administrations and strike-offs, and the disqualified directors register, also free on the Companies House service.

The join key is the company number: eight characters, assigned at incorporation, never reused. Scottish companies carry an SC prefix, Northern Irish NI, LLPs OC. Names change and recycle; the number never does.

2. How to search Companies House step by step

Searching is free, unlimited, and needs no registration.

1. Open the search service

   Go to find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk and type a company name, company number, or officer name. The Advanced company search adds filters for status, type, location and SIC code. Results show the company number, incorporation date and registered address, plus matching previous names, which is how you find a business that has renamed itself.

   

2. Pick the right result by number, not name

   Similar names abound ("Tesco PLC" sits next to dozens of Tesco subsidiaries), and dissolved companies' names can be re-registered by strangers. The company number is the only reliable identifier.

3. Open the company overview

   It shows the registered address, status, company type, incorporation date, SIC codes, and when the next accounts and confirmation statement are due. Overdue filings are an immediate red flag. The tabs that matter are Filing history, People and Charges.

   

4. Check the People tab

   Current and resigned officers, plus persons with significant control, the individuals holding more than 25% of shares or voting rights. This is the UK's public beneficial ownership register, something Germany and Switzerland keep locked away.

5. Download filings free

   The Filing history tab holds every document ever filed. Filter by Accounts and download any year's accounts as a PDF. For large businesses that means full audited statements with revenue and profit.

3. What data is public and what it costs

Almost everything is free. The UK abolished document fees in 2015, and fees only remain where paper and certification are involved.

What the register does not reliably hold: revenue for the vast majority of businesses (see the small-accounts catch above), employee counts beyond a rough band, and anything on sole traders or ordinary partnerships, which never register.

4. UK legal forms, briefly

The suffix tells you the structure, and how much the register will show you.

5. How to verify a UK company: a practical checklist

1. Confirm the registration

   Match the exact name and company number, check the status is Active, and confirm the registered address matches what the business gave you. For a quick first pass with revenue data included, use our free company lookup.

2. Check filing discipline

   The overview shows when accounts and the confirmation statement are due. Overdue filings precede most strike-offs and insolvencies, so treat them as an early warning.

3. Verify the people

   The People tab lists officers and PSCs. Check your contact is actually an officer, follow corporate PSCs up the chain, and run directors through the free disqualified directors search.

4. Read the accounts, and their age

   Private companies file up to nine months after year end, so the freshest accounts can describe a year that ended almost two years ago. Check the balance sheet date, not the filing date.

5. Check charges and The Gazette

   The Charges tab lists outstanding mortgages and debentures over the company's assets. The Gazette shows winding-up petitions and administrations that may not yet be reflected in the register status.

6. Limitations of the official register

Companies House is the most generous register in this series: free data, free API, public beneficial owners. Its limits are worth knowing precisely because so much looks available.

• Most accounts show no revenue. Small and micro-entity regimes let the majority of private businesses file balance-sheet-only accounts. ECCTA reforms will eventually require small companies to file a P&L, but that is not yet in force.
• Data was historically unverified. Companies House registered what was filed without checking it. Identity verification for directors and PSCs only became mandatory in late 2025, so older records deserve more scepticism.
• Accounts lag by up to 21 months. A nine-month filing window on top of a twelve-month financial year means “current” figures can be nearly two years old.
• Sole traders are absent. Millions of unincorporated businesses never appear on the register at all.
• PDFs and iXBRL, not one clean table. Accounts arrive as documents in varying formats; extracting comparable figures across businesses is real work.

Checking one supplier takes five minutes. Getting revenue for a portfolio of UK SMEs, the ones filing balance-sheet-only accounts, is where the free register stops.

7. Access UK register data programmatically

Companies House deserves credit here too: the official REST API is free, well documented, and covers profiles, officers, PSCs and filing history, rate-limited at 600 requests per five minutes. Free bulk snapshots of basic company data exist as well. If UK register facts are all you need, start there.

What it cannot give you: revenue for the small-accounts majority, parsed financials as clean fields rather than iXBRL documents, and one schema that also covers your German, Swiss or French counterparties. CompanyData maintains 8,852,655 UK business records, sourced from Companies House and other official sources, with revenue and employee figures as structured fields where filings omit them. The Companies House API serves them by company number, name or address, with free trial credits to start, and the same Company Data API covers 200+ other countries.

GET /api/company/search?nationalId=09446231

{
  "name": "MONZO BANK LIMITED",
  "companyNumber": "09446231",
  "city": "London, United Kingdom",
  "status": "Active",
  "sic2007": "64191 · Banks",
  "employees": "1,000 to 5,000",
  "revenueRange": "£100M+"
}

8. UK vs other company registers

The UK sets the benchmark for openness, so the comparison is mostly about what everyone else charges for: