Short answer. Companies House is the United Kingdom's registrar of companies, an executive agency of the Department for Business and Trade. It incorporates companies, keeps the statutory information they must file and publishes most of it free on the public register. The register records registration facts, not an assessment of whether a business is solvent, trading or trustworthy.
What Companies House does
Companies House is the registrar of companies for the United Kingdom. It incorporates and dissolves limited companies and limited liability partnerships, receives the information those entities are required by law to file, and publishes most of that information on a public register that anyone can search free of charge.
It is a registrar, not a regulator of trading conduct. It does not check that filed figures are accurate, does not approve businesses and does not rate them.
What is on the public register
- Registered company name and the 8-character company registration number.
- Company status, such as active, dissolved or in liquidation, and the company type.
- Date of incorporation.
- Registered office address, which is a correspondence address and not necessarily a trading location.
- Recorded SIC codes describing the activities the company reported.
- Filing dates and filing history, including annual accounts and confirmation statements.
- Officers, people with significant control and charges, on the official service.
What is not on the register
There is no credit score, risk rating, fraud check, customer review or turnover estimate. Small companies may file abridged or filleted accounts, so published financial detail is often limited. Sole traders and ordinary partnerships are not registered at all, so they have no company number.
How to read a record properly
- Confirm the entity: match the registered name, number, registered office and incorporation date against what you already know.
- Read status and filing dates together. Active status with long-overdue filings is a different picture from active with filings on time.
- Keep accounts separate from the confirmation statement: they are two different obligations with different dates.
- Note the date you checked. Register data changes as documents are filed.
Where this site fits in
companies.house is an independent research site, not the registrar and not GOV.UK. We retrieve company details from the Companies House Public Data API, show the time of each check, label our own explanations separately from official descriptions and link every company page to the official record. For the official service, filing your own documents or signing in to file, go to GOV.UK.
Related reading: how to find a company registration number and company number vs VAT number vs UTR.
This guide is general information about public company records, not legal, tax or financial advice. Independent service. Not affiliated with Companies House or GOV.UK.