What Companies House does not tell you about a director

The Companies House register is the best public record of a person’s business history in the UK, and it is worth knowing exactly what it is: a register of what companies filed. It is not a verified record, not a credit file and not a register of people. Reading it well means knowing where its edges are.

The filings were not checked

Companies House registers documents; until recently it did not check who filed them or whether what they said was true. Identity verification for directors and people with significant control was introduced by the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023: it opened as a voluntary service in April 2025 and became compulsory for new appointments from 18 November 2025, with existing directors verifying over the following year as their companies file confirmation statements. For the period most histories cover, the register records a director as the filer described them.

The same is true of the figures. Small companies’ accounts are unaudited, and Companies House checks that the right form was filed, not that the numbers are right.

Partial identifiers

• Date of birth: month and year only, for anything filed since October 2015. Two people with the same name born in the same month are indistinguishable from the search results.
• Address: a correspondence address, not a home address. It is often an accountant’s or a formation agent’s office, shared with hundreds of other directors, and it changes when the agent does.
• Nationality and occupation: whatever was written on the form.

One person, several records

Companies House does not maintain one record per person. A new officer record appears when a filing spells a name differently, adds or drops a middle name, or gives a new address. A director of twenty companies may be spread across five records, and the register offers no link between them. The linking is a judgement, made by comparing names, dates of birth, addresses and the companies the records share. A report shows its confidence in each link and asks the client to confirm which records are the person; different spellings across the confirmed records are themselves noted.

Reduced accounts and old figures

• Most companies file small-company or micro-entity accounts: a balance sheet and a few notes, with no profit and loss account and no turnover. You can see what the company owed and owned at the year end, not how it traded.
• Dormant company accounts say almost nothing, by design.
• A private company has nine months after its year end to file, so the newest accounts on the register may describe a position up to twenty-one months old.
• Appointments and resignations should be notified within fourteen days, and often are not. A resignation can be dated months before the filing that records it.
• Filings from before the mid-2000s, and many since, are scanned paper. They have to be read, not searched.

What the register does not hold at all

• Sole traders and ordinary partnerships, which are not registered. What the public record does hold about them is set out in how to check a builder or contractor.
• Overseas companies that have not registered a UK establishment.
• County court judgments, which are on the Register of Judgments, Orders and Fines.
• Personal bankruptcy, debt relief orders and bankruptcy restrictions, which are on the Individual Insolvency Register and, for bankruptcies, in The Gazette’s notices, and financial sanctions, which are on the UK Sanctions List (and, for the US and EU regimes, on the US Treasury’s and the EU’s lists). A Check the Director report searches all of them under the person’s registered names.
• Criminal convictions, regulatory findings and civil litigation.
• Credit scores, bank information and tax affairs beyond what the accounts show.
• A winding-up petition that was dismissed or withdrawn: the register records a winding-up order, not the petition.
• Shareholdings below the thresholds at which a person is named: confirmation statements list a private company’s shareholders, and the register of people with significant control names those with more than 25% or with significant influence, but a 10% holding in a company where the person is not an officer may appear nowhere under their name.

What this means for a check

None of this makes the register unreliable. It makes it a record to be read with its limits in view: link the records, read the filings rather than the summary pages, treat the latest accounts as history, and check the other registers for what this one does not hold. A Check the Director report does the first three. For the fourth it searches The Gazette, the UK, US and EU sanctions lists, the Individual Insolvency Register, HMRC’s list of deliberate tax defaulters, the Charity Commission’s registers, the FCA’s register, and France’s and Norway’s registers for directorships held there; county court judgments and other regulators’ registers are left to you. It states its own limitations on its front page, and it is not a credit reference, an identity check or a judgement of anyone; see how it works.

This guide describes the public record in general terms, for England and Wales unless it says otherwise. It is not legal advice.