UK Companies House API

Company search, full profiles, filing history, registered charges and SIC/incorporation-date filtering from the UK Companies House official public API — no scraping, no login bypass.

Why this exists

Existing Companies House actors on the store are single-endpoint (search-only or profile-only), priced anywhere from $1.5 to $50 per 1,000 for data the government publishes for free, and several ship officer/PSC personal data by default — a GDPR liability the buyer inherits. This actor combines advanced search (SIC code + incorporation date + status + location) with a full company profile in one normalized row, and keeps personal data (officers/PSCs) off by default.

You need your own free API key

Companies House has no shared/public key. Register (free, instant, no approval wait) at developer.company-information.service.gov.uk and pass the key as apiKey in the input. This is the same one-time step as getting an Apify API token — nobody else can do it for you since it's tied to your own account.

Modes

• search — free-text company name search
• advancedSearch (default) — filter by SIC code, incorporation date range, company status, location
• lookup — specific companies by 8-character company number or Companies House URL

Input

{
  "apiKey": "your-companies-house-api-key",
  "mode": "advancedSearch",
  "sicCodes": ["62012"],
  "incorporatedFrom": "2023-01-01",
  "companyStatus": ["active"],
  "location": "London",
  "maxResults": 500
}

Output (one row per company)

{
  "companyNumber": "12345678",
  "companyName": "Example Software Ltd",
  "companyStatus": "active",
  "companyType": "ltd",
  "incorporatedOn": "2019-03-04",
  "sicCodes": ["62012"],
  "registeredAddress": { "line1": "1 Example Street", "locality": "London", "postalCode": "EC1A 1AA", "country": "United Kingdom" },
  "accounts": { "lastMadeUpTo": "2025-03-31", "nextDue": "2026-12-31", "overdue": false, "accountsType": "micro-entity" },
  "confirmationStatement": { "lastMadeUpTo": "2025-06-01", "nextDue": "2026-06-15", "overdue": false },
  "hasCharges": false,
  "hasInsolvencyHistory": false,
  "previousNames": [],
  "filingHistory": [],
  "charges": [],
  "officers": [],
  "companiesHouseUrl": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/12345678",
  "licence": "Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0"
}

Set includeFilingHistory, includeCharges, or includeOfficers to true to populate those arrays (each costs one extra API call per company). Officers are off by default — see the Legal notes below.

Pricing

Pay-per-result: one company event per row returned. $2.00 per 1,000, no start fee.

Data source and legality

The Companies House Public Data API (api.company-information.service.gov.uk) is an official UK government API. Data is published under the Companies Act 2006 and released under the Open Government Licence v3.0 — commercial reuse with attribution is explicitly permitted, and this actor includes the required attribution in every output row.

Personal data: officer and PSC names, month/year of birth, and correspondence addresses are personal data under UK GDPR even though the register is public. includeOfficers defaults to false; enabling it makes you the data controller responsible for your own lawful basis (UK GDPR Art. 6(1)(f)). The actor never emits a full date of birth (the API only exposes month/year) or residential addresses.

Rate limits: Companies House allows 600 requests per 5 minutes per key. This actor throttles itself to roughly 1.7 requests/second and does not rotate keys or IPs to exceed that limit.

Getting started

For complete information see this article. To run the Actor use the following command:

$apify run

Deploy to Apify

Connect Git repository to Apify

If you've created a Git repository for the project, you can easily connect to Apify:

1. Go to Actor creation page
2. Click on Link Git Repository button

Push project on your local machine to Apify

You can also deploy the project on your local machine to Apify without the need for the Git repository.

1. Log in to Apify. You will need to provide your Apify API Token to complete this action.

   $apify login
   

2. Deploy your Actor. This command will deploy and build the Actor on the Apify Platform. You can find your newly created Actor under Actors -> My Actors.

   $apify push
   

Documentation reference

To learn more about Apify and Actors, take a look at the following resources:

• Apify SDK for Python documentation
• Apify Platform documentation
• Join our developer community on Discord