Companies House Data: What’s Available, What’s Missing, and How to Use It in 2026

The UK Registry Data Landscape in 2026

Companies House is one of the most open corporate registries in the world. It holds registration data, officer histories, financial filings, charges, and ownership records for over 5 million active UK companies — all publicly searchable, most available via a free API. No subscription required. No access restrictions.

That openness makes the UK an outlier. Most major economies restrict access to company data behind paywalls, legitimate interest tests, or government portals that break regularly. The UK is different. But open does not mean clean, complete, or production-ready.

Companies House is the central registry for UK companies, LLPs, and overseas entities owning UK land. It is maintained by an executive agency of the UK government and funded through filing fees. The register currently holds data on over 5 million active companies and a further several million dissolved entities.

Three registers sit within or alongside Companies House:

1. The Main Companies Register — Every UK company must file here from incorporation. Covers name, registered address, SIC codes, incorporation date, filing history, and status. Public and free.

2. The PSC Register (People with Significant Control) — Introduced in 2016. Records individuals or entities holding more than 25% of shares, voting rights, or board control. Publicly searchable. The UK's mechanism for ownership transparency.

3. The Register of Overseas Entities (ROE) — Introduced in 2022. Requires overseas entities owning UK land to register their beneficial owners annually with Companies House. Criminal penalties for non-compliance.

What Data Companies House Actually Holds

The UK registry data ecosystem is broader than most teams realise — and more fragmented than the headline suggests. Here is exactly what each source provides, in practice:

How to Access UK Registry Data — Free, Paid, and via API

Free Access — Companies House

The baseline access is free and surprisingly capable. The Companies House API is RESTful, returns JSON, and requires only a free API key. It covers company profiles, PSC data, directors, filing history, charges, and a real-time streaming feed for updates.

The PSC bulk download is updated weekly and available as a JSON snapshot — useful for building your own database. The free URI service allows machine-readable lookups by company number in multiple formats including JSON, XML, and CSV.

Paid Access — What Requires a Commercial Provider

The Companies House API does not include: credit scores, revenue or headcount estimates, contact data, social media profiles, group corporate structures beyond direct subsidiaries, firmographic enrichment, or data on companies registered outside the UK. For compliance teams running full KYB workflows, these gaps are not optional extras — they are core to the check.

Commercial providers like Zephira layer structured financials, corporate linkage, firmographics, and global coverage on top of the government registry source. This is not a replacement — it is an extension. The government data remains the authoritative foundation; the commercial layer makes it actionable at scale.

API vs. Bulk Data Delivery

Different use cases require different delivery formats. Real-time KYB onboarding needs an API with sub-second response times. Bulk data licensing — for data platforms, financial intelligence, or model training — requires file delivery via S3 or SFTP. Both formats are available through Zephira, with the same underlying dataset.

Who Can Access UK Registry Data

The UK's main company register, PSC data, officer records, filings, and charges are fully public with no access restrictions. There is no legitimate interest test. There is no registration required to browse. Any person — individual, company, or automated system — can search and download Companies House data for free.

ECCTA 2023: How the Registry Is Changing

The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 (ECCTA) is the largest overhaul of Companies House in a generation. It transforms Companies House from a passive filing registry into an active regulator with powers to query, reject, and share data with law enforcement. Implementation runs 2024–2027.

The Real Data Quality Challenges

1. The 25% Threshold Leaves Large Gaps

The PSC regime only captures individuals or entities holding more than 25% of shares, voting rights, or control. A network of individuals each holding 24% is invisible to the register. Complex structures — where control is exercised through shareholder agreements, board appointment rights, or veto provisions — may fall below the threshold even when effective control exists.

2. Corporate PSCs Hide the Beneficial Owner

When a company is listed as a PSC rather than an individual, you have a declaration of legal ownership, not beneficial ownership. FATF standards require UBOs to be natural persons. A corporate PSC filing means the real human behind the chain is not disclosed at that level — it must be traced further, often across jurisdictions.

3. The API Has No SLA or Uptime Guarantee

The Companies House API is a government service. There is no Service Level Agreement. There are no uptime guarantees. There are scheduled maintenance windows and unplanned outages. For teams building production workflows — onboarding flows, real-time enrichment, customer-facing lookups — this is a genuine operational risk. When Companies House goes down, you wait. There is no compensation and no escalation path.

4. No Corporate Linkage Tracing

Companies House does not trace ownership chains across multiple corporate layers. If a UK company is owned by a holding company, which is owned by a trust, which is controlled by a Luxembourg entity — the API tells you none of this. You see only the first declared layer. For full UBO identification, you need cross-jurisdictional corporate linkage mapping.

5. International Structures Are Invisible to Companies House

Once ownership exits the UK, Companies House stops. The real beneficial owner of a UK subsidiary may be a natural person in Singapore, a trust in Jersey, or an opaque holding structure in the British Virgin Islands. The ROE helps for UK land-owning overseas entities — but it does not cover the broader universe of UK companies with foreign parents.

The 40% Problem: Unstructured Financial Data

Here is the data quality issue that most people in this space underestimate. Companies House holds millions of sets of annual accounts for UK companies — but only around 40% of those financial statements are available as structured, machine-readable data. The remaining 60% are scanned PDFs or image files.

That means if you query the Companies House API for a company's turnover, net assets, or profit — you will hit a wall for the majority of companies. The filing exists. The document is there. But the data inside it is locked in a static image.

This is not a new problem, but it is getting more urgent. Financial data is central to:

— Credit risk assessment — is this company financially sound enough to onboard?
— AML risk scoring — does declared turnover match transaction volumes?
— Sanctions screening — are revenue estimates consistent with the stated business?
— Due diligence — what does this company actually look like financially?

The April 2027 mandatory digital filing deadline will improve this over time. But the historical backlog will not automatically resolve. Accounts filed before that date will remain as static documents unless someone applies OCR and AI extraction to them systematically.

How Zephira Solves It

Zephira is built on the same underlying government registry data that Companies House publishes — but solves the structural problems that make raw registry data difficult to use at scale. Here is what that looks like in practice:

UK Registry Data in Global Context

Companies House is genuinely exceptional by global standards. Most national registries are harder to access, less structured, and offer fewer data types. Understanding where the UK sits relative to other major economies matters for data teams building cross-border coverage.

For a complete global breakdown — covering 200+ jurisdictions including access status, data availability, registry URLs, and FATF risk classifications — see our.

FAQ: 10 Questions About UK Registry Data