Companies House publishes the UK company register, including the register of people with significant control. Covenance reads it directly through the official API.
Companies House, kept by Companies House, the registrar of companies for the United Kingdom.
Companies House is the UK registrar of companies. Its register is free to search, and the data is published under the Open Government Licence v3.0, which permits reuse with attribution.
Ownership on this register means persons with significant control, or PSCs. A person is a PSC of a company on any of five specified conditions in Schedule 1A of the Companies Act 2006: holding, directly or indirectly, more than 25% of the shares; holding, directly or indirectly, more than 25% of the voting rights; holding the right to appoint or remove a majority of the board; having the right to exercise, or actually exercising, significant influence or control; or exercising that influence over a trust or firm that itself meets one of the first four conditions.
Companies whose voting shares are admitted to trading on certain regulated markets are exempt from the PSC requirements, because they are already subject to shareholding disclosure rules. For those companies the register carries an exemption notice rather than a list of controllers.
Taken from the register's own documentation and from the national rules it is kept under. The sources are listed at the foot of this page.
| Information | Access | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Company profile | Public | Registered name and company number, company type and status, registered office address, SIC codes, incorporation date, and the dates accounts and confirmation statements are due. |
| Officers | Public | Current and former directors and secretaries with their appointment and resignation dates, name, nationality, country of residence, service address, and the month and year of birth. |
| People with significant control | Public | For each PSC: name, month and year of birth, nationality, country or area of residence, service address, the date they became a PSC, and which of the specified conditions they meet. Also the statements a company files in place of a PSC entry, such as that it has no PSC or that it has not yet identified one. |
| Residential address and day of birth | Restricted | A person's usual residential address and the day of their date of birth are not shown on the public register. Companies House says it shares them only in strict circumstances or where required by law. |
| Shareholders | Not published | The public data API has no shareholder or share capital resource. Shareholdings appear in the confirmation statement, which is a filed document rather than structured data, so a holding below the PSC threshold is not available as a field. |
| Filing history and documents | Public | The list of filings and the documents behind them, including accounts filed in iXBRL, where the filing was made electronically. |
| Charges, insolvency and exemptions | Public | Registered charges over the company's assets, insolvency cases recorded against it, and notices that a company is exempt from the PSC requirements. |
The list below is what the connector actually calls, not what the register could in principle provide. Every value Covenance stores carries its source and the date it was read.
Candidate companies for a name, so a reviewer can confirm which company is meant before anything else runs.
Name, registered address, status and SIC codes, each carrying the date it was read.
Current and resigned officers, with the register's own dates.
The PSC entries, including control rights and corporate holders, used as the declared side of the ownership chain.
The register's own entries and any statement filed in place of them, pulled for a named case.
The filing history and document metadata, so a finding can point at the filing it came from.
Figures read from the iXBRL rendition of a filed set of accounts.
Insolvency cases recorded on the register.
A register answers the questions it holds answers to. These are the limits that change what an onboarding file can conclude, stated rather than left to be discovered.
Companies House publishes holders above the 25% PSC threshold and no shareholder register. A holding below that threshold is not on the register as data, so an ownership chain built from Companies House alone is incomplete by design and Covenance reports that gap rather than implying completeness.
A company reports its own PSCs. From 18 November 2025, identity verification for directors and PSCs began under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, with a transition period for existing officeholders, so verification coverage is still growing.
A company exempt from the PSC requirements carries an exemption notice instead of a list of controllers. Ownership for those companies has to be established from their market disclosures, not from this register.
A set of accounts filed on paper, or electronically before iXBRL, is on the register as a scan. Covenance reports that period as unread rather than as a set of zeroes.
A licence or an access basis is part of the record, not a footnote: it decides what may be done with a value after it is read.
Companies House data is published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Anything derived from it carries the licence's attribution: “Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.”
Read on 2026-10-25. Where a fact about the register comes from a national instrument rather than from the register's own pages, the instrument is cited.