Companies House

Companies House is the executive agency of the Department for Business and Trade that incorporates and dissolves UK limited companies and maintains the public register of company information. It dates to 1844, when the Joint Stock Companies Act created the first centralised company register and the office of Registrar.

As of May 2025 it held records for over 5.44 million active companies, including more than 5.11 million private limited companies and over 4,000 public limited companies, and requires companies to file annual accounts and confirmation statements as public records.

As the statutory record behind almost every company our coverage reports on, Companies House functions as a recurring fact-check tool rather than a newsmaker in its own right: useful for confirming a raise or filing happened and roughly when, but its filings routinely lag events by days to weeks, and it does not itself verify the figures a company or investor announces.