The Complete Guide to Companies House Data

Financial accounts · PSC beneficial ownership · Officers and directors · Charges · Confirmation statements · Access methods compared

1. What Companies House is and what it holds

Companies House is an executive agency of the Department for Business and Trade. It operates three registrars: Companies House Cardiff for England and Wales, Companies House Edinburgh for Scotland, and Companies House Belfast for Northern Ireland. Together they maintain records on over five million active entities and incorporate more than 500,000 new companies each year. The register is freely searchable at find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk and has been accessed over 16 billion times annually since becoming free in 2015.

The register holds six main categories of data: financial accounts filed annually by each company, PSC beneficial ownership records, officer appointments and resignations, confirmation statements which include shareholder information, charges and mortgages registered against company assets, and insolvency and dissolution filings. Each category is stored separately, accessed via different endpoints or download products, and has different coverage, reliability, and usability characteristics. The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 (ECCTA) has significantly expanded Companies House powers since 2024, including mandatory identity verification for directors and PSCs, active data quality enforcement, and a sole register function that removes the previous inconsistency between internal and public records.

2. Financial accounts: what you get by company size

Every UK limited company - private limited (Ltd), public limited (PLC), and limited liability partnership (LLP) - must file annual accounts with Companies House. Sole traders and general partnerships are exempt. The filing deadline is nine months after the financial year-end for private companies and six months for public companies. Late filing penalties start at £150 and escalate to £1,500 for filings more than six months late. In practice this means the most recent accounts available for any given company are typically between six and fifteen months old, and reflect a financial position that may be considerably more dated. For a detailed breakdown of what financial data is available by filing type, see our guide to what financial data is available from Companies House.

The level of financial detail in the accounts depends entirely on the company's size classification under the Companies Act. A company qualifies for a size category if it meets two of the three criteria for that category. The thresholds below apply for accounting periods beginning on or after 6 April 2025.

Size thresholds and P&L disclosure requirements

The vast majority of UK companies are small or micro. Both are legally permitted to file a balance sheet only, with no requirement to disclose turnover, gross profit, operating profit, EBITDA, or cash flow. This is the single most important thing to understand before working with UK company financial data: revenue figures are simply not in the public record for most UK private companies, and no data provider can supply what was never filed.

What each size company must file

Balance sheet data, even without turnover, is more useful than people often expect. Total assets, current assets, fixed assets, liabilities, and equity reveal company scale, financial resilience, leverage, and year-on-year trajectory. Where a company does disclose turnover or P&L figures, those are available in the filed accounts. Dormant companies still file accounts but these contain only a simplified balance sheet with no useful financial data.

For a detailed explanation of why most UK companies do not disclose turnover and what financial data can be used instead, see our guide to why most UK companies do not disclose turnover.

3. PSC beneficial ownership data

Since April 2016, UK companies have been legally required to identify and register their Persons with Significant Control. The PSC register is the UK's beneficial ownership register and is one of the most open of its kind in the world. Unlike some EU jurisdictions that restricted public access following a 2022 Court of Justice ruling, the UK has maintained fully open public access with no access restrictions, no login requirement, and no restriction to AML-obliged entities. PSC records for any company are searchable for free at find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk. For a full explanation of how PSC data works, see our guide to what is PSC data.

A person or entity qualifies as a PSC if they hold more than 25 percent of shares or voting rights, can appoint or remove the majority of directors, or otherwise exercise significant influence or control. Companies must update their PSC register within 14 days of any change and notify Companies House within a further 14 days. Failure to comply is a criminal offence. The PSC register records the direct owner or controller - a company is only required to register its immediate PSC, not the full chain above it. Tracing ultimate beneficial ownership through multiple layers of corporate ownership requires following PSC records recursively across each entity in the chain.

Each PSC record contains the owner's name, nationality, country of residence, month and year of birth (day is not collected), ownership band (25-50%, 50-75%, or 75%+), nature of control (shares, voting rights, appointment rights, or significant influence), and whether the registrant is an individual or a corporate entity. Full residential address is held by Companies House. From November 2025, all new PSC appointments require identity verification under ECCTA, improving reliability of new records, though pre-2025 records remain unverified.

4. Officers, directors, and identity verification

Companies House maintains an appointments register for every current and former director and company secretary across all registered entities. Each record includes the officer's name, service address, appointment date, and resignation date where applicable. Service addresses are typically a business address and are publicly accessible; residential addresses are held separately and are not publicly visible unless a director has chosen to use their home address as their service address.

Officer name searches are one of the most powerful features of the Companies House search: entering a person's name returns every current and former directorship across any UK company, making it straightforward to map an individual's full corporate history. This is widely used for due diligence, investigative journalism, and counterparty risk assessment.

From 18 November 2025 under ECCTA, all new director and PSC appointments require identity verification before taking effect. Each officer record now includes an identity verification status field. Existing directors and PSCs have a transition period running until 17 November 2026 to complete verification. An unverified director will block confirmation statement filing entirely once that transition period ends. Between April 2024 and March 2025, Companies House queried or removed inaccurate information relating to 106,300 companies under its new active gatekeeper powers.

5. Confirmation statements and shareholder data

Every UK company must file a confirmation statement at least once every 12 months. The confirmation statement records the company's current structure including its registered office, directors, PSCs, and share capital. Crucially, it also contains shareholder information - the names of shareholders and the number, class, and denomination of shares held. This is the primary source of shareholder data in the public record.

Shareholder information is not returned by the Companies House REST API. It is contained within the confirmation statement document, which must be downloaded as a PDF and read directly. This creates a meaningful friction point for programmatic or bulk analysis of shareholder data - unlike PSC records, which are available as a structured JSON bulk download, shareholder information requires document-level retrieval and parsing. Filing fees for confirmation statements rose to £50 from 1 February 2026.

6. Charges and mortgages

When a company raises secured debt, it must register a charge against its assets with Companies House. The charges register records the date of creation, the type of charge, the assets secured, and the name of the person entitled to the charge (typically a lender or bank). Outstanding and satisfied charges are both visible in the filing history. This data is useful for credit assessment, identifying financial exposure, detecting potential asset stripping, and understanding a company's debt structure independently of its balance sheet disclosures.

Charge data is returned by the Companies House REST API and is available for individual company lookups at no cost. A bulk charges data product is available on request through the developer forum for teams needing programmatic access at scale.

7. Insolvency and dissolution

Companies House holds records of all insolvency proceedings and dissolution actions for UK companies. This includes voluntary strike-off applications (DS01), compulsory strike-off notices, liquidation documents, administration orders, and receivership appointments. A company's status - active, dissolved, in administration, in liquidation, or in receivership - is displayed prominently on its Companies House record and is returned by the API.

An application to strike off (DS01) is worth investigating in any due diligence context, particularly where a company has outstanding creditors or active contracts. Liquidation documents including the Statement of Affairs and Liquidator's Statement of Proceedings are publicly available as downloads from the filing history.

8. How to access the data

Companies House provides several routes to its data, each suited to different use cases. All are free unless otherwise noted.

Web search portal

The web interface at find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk allows free searching by company name, company registration number, or officer name. No account is required. Individual filings can be downloaded as PDF. This is the right tool for individual company lookups, verification, and reading specific filed documents. It does not scale to bulk or programmatic use.

REST API

The free REST API at developer-specs.company-information.service.gov.uk returns structured JSON for company profiles, officer records, PSC data, filing history, charges, and insolvency data. A free API key is required. Rate limited to 600 requests per five minutes. The API does not return parsed financial figures - it returns filing metadata and document links. To retrieve balance sheet numbers you must download the iXBRL filing document and parse it separately. The API does not return shareholder data from confirmation statements.

Streaming API

A separate streaming API provides a near real-time event stream of changes to the register including new filings, officer appointments and resignations, address changes, and insolvency events. It delivers JSON events via HTTP long-polling. Each account is limited to two concurrent streaming connections. The streaming API does not flag director disqualifications and does not deliver the financial content within filings - only the event that a new filing has occurred.

Free Company Data Product (CSV)

A monthly CSV snapshot of all active companies containing basic profile data: company name, registration number, registered address, SIC codes, incorporation date, and status. No financial data is included. Available at download.companieshouse.gov.uk. Useful for building a universe of companies to enrich with other sources.

Accounts Data Product (iXBRL)

Daily and monthly ZIP files containing all electronically filed company accounts in iXBRL format. This is the source for financial data at scale. Updated daily as new accounts are filed. Available at download.companieshouse.gov.uk. Requires an iXBRL parser and data normalisation pipeline to produce structured financial data. Covers approximately 89% of UK companies that have filed accounts - those submitted electronically. Paper-filed accounts are not included.

PSC bulk data snapshot (JSON)

A full JSON snapshot of all PSC records across the register. Available at download.companieshouse.gov.uk. Free to download under the Open Government Licence. Requires processing and normalisation to produce a queryable ownership dataset.

XML Gateway

A paid subscription service for machine-to-machine queries supporting higher volume access than the free REST API. Suitable for enterprise KYB workflows requiring continuous, high-volume programmatic access to Companies House data. Contact Companies House directly for access.

9. When raw data is not enough: structured data providers

Companies House data is authoritative, free, and comprehensive in scope. What it is not is analysis-ready. Financial data lives inside iXBRL filing documents that require parsing and normalisation before they can be queried or compared. PSC data requires processing to combine with financial records. Shareholder data requires document-level retrieval. Filtering across the entire register by financial criteria, ownership type, or sector is not something Companies House natively supports.

Structured data providers build on top of Companies House bulk data products to deliver queryable datasets and APIs. Typical enhancements include parsed and normalised financial data, ownership information combined with financial records, pre-calculated ratios, growth indicators and large-scale filtering by sector, geography, ownership type and financial profile. Different providers focus on different use cases such as financial screening, ownership research, compliance, lead generation, M&A sourcing or software integration.

DataLedger specialises in structured financial data from electronic Companies House filings, PSC beneficial ownership records and corporate ownership chains. Financial data, ownership data and corporate structure data can be accessed through the API or delivered as custom datasets for analysis, screening and integration projects.

10. Key limitations

Several limitations apply to Companies House data regardless of how it is accessed, because they are limitations of the underlying public record. Understanding them before building any workflow on top of Companies House data avoids the most common problems.