Companies House Reform: The New Verification Rules Every UK Founder Needs to Know

Six to seven million people. That's Companies House's own estimate of how many UK directors and persons with significant control will need to verify their identity with the registrar by the time a 12-month transition period closes on 18 November 2026. Given how routine — and previously unchecked — UK company registration has always been, that's a striking number, and a fair few of the people it applies to still don't know it yet.

The requirement, which took effect on 18 November 2025, comes from the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023. It's the most consequential change to how UK companies are registered in decades, and it exists for a specific reason: Companies House has, for most of its 180-year history, been a purely administrative registrar. It recorded whatever it was told and had no power to check whether any of it was true — a gap widely blamed for the UK register becoming, in the words of fraud investigators and MPs alike, an easy place to plant fabricated directors or run shell companies.

Who has to verify, and by when

New directors and new company incorporations went first: since 18 November 2025, nobody can be appointed a director, or incorporate a new UK company, without verifying their identity beforehand. Existing directors get more breathing room, but not indefinitely — they need to have verified before their company's next confirmation statement filing after 5 March 2026, which for most companies means sometime before their annual filing date in 2026. PSCs who are also directors follow the same confirmation-statement timeline; PSCs who aren't directors have a narrower 14-day window tied to their birth month.

Verification can be done two ways: directly with Companies House through a GOV.UK One Login account, which most people can complete in a few minutes with a passport or driving licence, or through an Authorised Corporate Service Provider — typically an accountant, solicitor, or company formation agent who has itself gone through a separate authorisation process with Companies House. Once verified, an individual receives a personal code that covers every directorship or PSC role they hold, so it only needs doing once.

Why founders shouldn't wait for their filing date

The consequence of missing the deadline isn't abstract. From 18 November 2025 onward, Companies House simply won't process a confirmation statement, director appointment, or several other filing types unless everyone involved has verified. A company that turns up to file its confirmation statement with an unverified director doesn't get a warning letter — it gets a rejected filing, which can cascade into everything from delayed bank account changes to failed supplier due diligence checks that increasingly reference Companies House's identity-verification status directly.

For companies with multiple directors or PSCs, the practical risk is that one unverified person can hold up a filing that everyone else is ready to submit — which is why accountants advising on this have generally recommended treating verification as a company-wide task to knock out early, rather than something each director handles individually whenever it's convenient.

The one thing worth flagging to your accountant now

If a founder or director already works with an accountant or formation agent on filings, it's worth confirming directly that the firm has itself become an Authorised Corporate Service Provider under the new regime — filing on a client's behalf without that authorisation won't satisfy the requirement, regardless of how long the relationship has run.