Companies House is a division of the Department for Business, Skills, and Innovation. It regulates and incorporates limited liability partnerships and limited companies in the United Kingdom, operating in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and England and Wales.
Limited companies, and limited liability partnerships (LLPs), have to file documents with Companies House such as:
- Accounts in a set format (‘statutory accounts’)
- Annual Return, showing who the directors / members of the organization are, who owns the organization and where it is registered
- Change of address notifications for directors, members and the organization itself.
These documents are kept by Companies House and put on the public record, so that they are visible to anyone who wishes to look them up online.
As of October 2021, there are 4.99 million businesses on the Companies House register. More than 780,000 businesses were incorporated in 2020 alone.
Apart from providing postal and online company formation services as well as maintaining a detailed public register with details of these incorporated companies, Companies House offers electronic filing and data products for companies, plus a few information services for the entire public.
Some of these products include:
The Company Data Product
The Free Company Data Product is a downloadable data snapshot containing basic company data of live companies on the register. This snapshot is provided as ZIP files containing data in CSV format and is split into multiple files for ease of downloading.
The latest snapshot is be updated within 5 working days of the previous month end.
The snapshot includes:
- basic information including company type and registered office address
- the nature of business or standard industrial classification (SIC)
- company status, such as ‘live’ or ‘dissolved’
- date of last accounts or confirmation statement filed
- date of next accounts or confirmation statement due
- previous company names
How to download Company data
Either download the Company data as one large file or as smaller multiple files (for ease of downloading) as an excel file, or a pdf.
Any of these files are fairly simple to obtain, and they contain a wealth of knowledge about the firm, its directors, and its financial performance. However, if all of the information your looking for is dowloaded as a PDF that has been preserved as a picture, it can be challenging to look through them. Unfortunately, you’ll have to look for the word or figure you’re looking for rather than being able to “Ctrl-F” your way to it.
Accounts data product
The accounts data product is a free ZIP file that you can download. It comprises the individual data files (instance documents) of firm accounts that were submitted electronically to Companies House.
The most recent accounts data can be downloaded from the daily files provided here, whilst historic accounts data is available from the previous year’s monthly files.
The individual data files within the ZIP file will be in one of three formats:
- inline XBRL format (.html file extension),
- XBRL format (.xml file extension), or
- a ZIP of UKSEF iXBRL (.zip file extension).
Each data file is provided free of charge and is not supported, and due to its size, each file can take several minutes to download.
How often is it updated?
Over a 5-day period, each morning a new daily file will be added (Tuesday-Saturday). With the exception of Tuesday’s file, which includes data from the preceding Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, each file only contains the accounts data recorded on the previous day.
Each daily file added will only be accessible for 60 calendar days, after which it will be deleted and the data will only be accessible through the monthly files from the preceding year.
Only electronically submitted accounts, which presently account for around 60% of the 2.2 million accounts filed at Companies House annually, have data available.
People with significant control (PSC) snapshot
The complete list of PSCs given to Companies House is contained in the People with Significant Control (PSC) snapshot, a downloadable data snapshot.
For convenience of downloading, each data file is offered in JSON format and may be downloaded as a single file or as several ones. The most recent data is daily overwritten in all files.
Uniform resource identifiers (URI)
Using a straightforward unified resource identifier (URI) for each firm on companies’ houses’ registry, the free URI service provides access to basic company information.
A Uniform Resource Identifier is a special string of characters used by web technologies to identify logical or physical resources. Objects in the real world like people and locations, ideas, and informational resources like web pages and books may all be uniquely identified using URIs.
In the case of Companies House, the URI is permanent and represents the company. When used as an internet address, it will return basic company details in a format appropriate for the requesting system. Such a URI may be stored and freely exchanged as a company reference that can be used to discover the latest basic company details. It provides a more efficient way of data linking for users and the business information industry
Your internet browser will show the business data as an HTML page if you use the URI URL. In addition, you may return data in RDF, JSON, XML, CSV, and YAML forms.
You can utilize the data in your own software or incorporate the URI as a link on your own website.
XML gateway search service
The XML gateway for Companies Houses provides computer to computer search access to their data and documents.
XML is used to request and deliver data and documents (eXtensible Markup Language). Users of the service will be able to search corporate records using their own software as a result.
It is mandatory to utilize standard XML data formats as described in the interface specification, which is available on our specialised XML gateway output page.
Before an XML output account can be formed, users must run a test to ensure they can request and receive data.
In addition to an extra price for any requested data or documents, there is a monthly membership fee of £4.70. Users receive a 15 percent discount on their monthly invoice total. There is no charge for basic corporate information.
How up to date is Companies House data?
The majority of Companies House documents have a 14–30 day filing window, while yearly accounts have a 9–month window. The yearly deadline for submitting accounts and reports was recently extended by three months for UK businesses due to the coronavirus outbreak. If a company doesn’t provide its accounts or confirmation statements to Companies House within three months of receiving a first Gazette notice, it may be fined or removed from the register.