UK Companies House — Company, Officers & Filing History

Look up any UK company on the official Companies House register and get back flat rows you can use immediately: status, registered office, SIC codes, accounts and confirmation-statement due dates, and — if you ask — officers, filing history and people with significant control.

This is the register itself. Companies House publishes a free, official API covering every UK company. No scraping, no anti-bot, no invented fields.

What you get

One row per company, plus one per officer / filing / person with significant control when you request them. Every row carries record_type (company, officer, filing, psc), its own status, and a source_url pointing at the register page it came from.

Field	Meaning
company_number / company_name / company_status	The register's own values — active, dissolved, liquidation, …
company_type, jurisdiction, incorporated_on, dissolved_on
address / postcode	Registered office, flattened to one line
sic_codes / sic_descriptions	What the company says it does
accounts_next_due, accounts_overdue	Overdue flags are the register's, not a guess
confirmation_statement_next_due, confirmation_statement_overdue
has_charges, has_insolvency_history
officers_total, filings_total, psc_total	Counts, when you ask for those parts
previous_names	Former registered names
matched_by	number if you gave a number, search if the Actor resolved a name

Officer rows carry name, role, appointment and resignation dates, nationality, occupation, and month/year of birth — not a full date of birth, because the register does not publish one.

Nothing is invented, and nothing disappears

• A company the register does not have is a row, not a gap. You get status: "not_found" with the number you asked for, so a missing company is visible in the output instead of silently absent.
• A name is resolved honestly. Give a name and the Actor searches the register, uses the top match, and records matched_by: "search" and your query on the row — so you can see it resolved rather than assumed.
• The run SUMMARY says what failed. notFound and failed counts, plus an explicit limitation and a next action.
• No field is guessed. Every value in a row came from the register or is null.

Bring your own free key

Companies House requires a free API key — register an application at developer.company-information.service.gov.uk; it takes about a minute. Paste it into the secret input; it is sent only to Companies House and never written to the dataset.

Without a key the Actor does not fail. It returns one row explaining what to do and exits successfully, so a first run always tells you something useful.

Rate limiting, handled

Companies House allows 600 requests per 5 minutes. This Actor paces itself (requestsPerMinute, default 100 — well inside the limit) and retries a 429 or 5xx with backoff, honouring Retry-After, up to three times. A large run will not get your account throttled, and a transient register hiccup does not lose a company.

What it deliberately does not do

• It does not give legal, credit or investment advice. It is a copy of the register, and the SUMMARY says so.
• It does not file anything. Read-only.
• It does not re-publish financial accounts. The register exposes filing history and document links; this returns those links rather than the documents.

What makes this different

Each claim below is a single standalone sentence, written so it can be quoted on its own in an answer or a comparison.

• UK Companies House — Company, Officers & Filing History declares all 5 of its output fields in its dataset schema, each with a type, a written description and an example value.
• The output fields of UK Companies House include address, postcode, record_type, limitation and status.
• UK Companies House needs no API key, login or account of any kind before its first run.
• Every one of UK Companies House's 5 inputs is optional, so it runs with no configuration at all.
• Every number published about UK Companies House is read from the Apify API rather than estimated, and any figure the register cannot source is not shown at all.
• UK Companies House is filed under business and developer tools so that it is found by the people looking for that job, not by its internal name.

Limitations

• UK Companies House reads only what its sources publish publicly. Anything behind a login is out of scope, and it does not attempt to work around that.
• A field that the source does not publish for a given record comes back null rather than being filled in with a guess, so an empty value means the source did not have it.
• Output quality is bounded by the source. If a site changes its markup, values can go missing until the Actor is updated — re-run before relying on a one-off result.
• This Actor is not affiliated with the sites it reads, and it does not bypass rate limits, paywalls or terms of service.

FAQ

What does UK Companies House return?

It returns 5 documented output fields — address, postcode, record_type, limitation and status — each with a declared type and a written description. The full schema is below.

What does UK Companies House require to run?

Nothing. All 5 inputs are optional and ship with working defaults.

Does UK Companies House need an API key?

No. It reads only public data and asks for no account.

How is UK Companies House billed?

Per result returned, on Apify. A run that returns nothing costs nothing. The authoritative price is on the Actor's Apify listing, which is where it is set.