Companies House
Search companies and individuals in the United Kingdom.
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Search companies and individuals in the United Kingdom.
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Use Companies House to get information on companies registered in the UK - it's the official register of companies (so a government agency collates the data).
Anyone wanting to operate a limited company in the UK has to register with them. This includes a limited company (Ltd), public limited company (PLC), or limited liability partnership (LLP). The size of the company does not determine the requirement to register. Sole traders don't have to register; nor do partnerships (without limited liability) - those are companies that involve two or more people that share ownership. Companies House is also responsible for dissolving companies.
For each company, Companies House publishes:
Basic company details (registration number, registered office address, incorporation date, company type, status and standard industrial categorisation ()
Directors, company secretary and PSCs ()
Shareholding info
Annual financial statements.
The site has a by company or person name. The allows you to filter (e.g. by status), and to download a CSV of search results (which will include only the first 5,000 results).
You can also search for UK companies on and , but you are more likely to find up-to-date financial statements on Companies House. North Data may have other useful information (e.g. a graphic timeline of the company history and a network diagram of people and related companies).
The is also published on Companies House. It's the register of overseas entities that own land or property in the UK, which are required to declare their beneficial owners and/or managing officers. To search for them use the function and change the company type filter to ‘overseas entity’. If you then select search, you'll see the first 10,000 records on the register. Use other filters (e.g. the incorporation date filter, or part of the company name) to narrow down your search results.
You can all the basic company data of live companies on the register. This would be useful for things like compiling statistics on the number of company formations in a particular year, or a geographical analysis of all registered addresses.
Note that companies in overseas territories (e.g. Gibraltar) don't need to register with Companies House - for such companies, go to the territory's registry.
No registration is required and the site is free.
A lot of data is stored as scanned PDFs so you can't copy text from them (e.g. annual returns).
Department for Business and Trade, UK
Katherine de Tolly
Companies House states that they don't check the accuracy of information that companies submit; they just check that submissions are complete (see this in the section "Company Information supplied by Companies House" on ).
Applications can be made to redact Companies House data. This is usually done for privacy reasons, for instance for residential addresses (see more: ).
This is public facing information. As company officers have the option to remove sensitive information about themselves, the ethical considerations are limited (see more here: ).
Creating with Data: (Video guide to simple and advanced search and the API)
Companies House:
Companies House:
Beauhurst Limited: (scroll down to 'The Basics of Companies House')
Companies House
Jonas Montenarh, Simon Marsden: (journal paper that describes various uses of Companies House data)