Companies House UK Business Data Scraper

Turn public registry data into actionable business intelligence.

This professional-grade Apify Actor connects directly to the UK Companies House Public Data API. It is designed for sales teams, marketers, and analysts who need to generate targeted lists of UK companies and—crucially—identify the people behind them.

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🎯 The Ultimate Lead Generation Funnel

Most tools just give you a company name. This Actor is designed to help you find Decision Makers.

By using the Data Enrichment features, you can turn a list of companies into a list of prospects:

1. Find New Business: Filter by "Incorporation Date" to catch companies the moment they are founded—the perfect time to sell B2B services (Accounting, SEO, Legal, Banking).
2. Target Specific Locations: Use granular Postcode Prefixes (e.g., "M1", "SW1") to dominate specific geographic territories.
3. Identify Key People: Enable Officer Enrichment to extract names of active Directors and PSC Enrichment to find beneficial owners (Persons with Significant Control).

Core Use Cases

Use Case	Strategy
📍 Hyper-Local Sales	Find every new construction company (SIC Code) in a specific postcode area (e.g., "B1") formed in the last 30 days.
👔 Director Outreach	Generate a list of active Directors for all "Software Development" companies in London to fuel your LinkedIn or cold email campaigns.
🔍 Due Diligence	Bulk check the status (Active/Dissolved) and Registered Office Address of thousands of companies in seconds.
📊 Market Research	Analyze the density of specific business types across different UK regions to plan expansion.

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🚀 Key Features

• Granular Geographic Targeting:
  • Postcode Prefixes: Search by partial postcodes (e.g., SW1A, M50). Supports multiple prefixes in one run.
  • Locality: Search by Town or City (e.g., "Manchester", "Leeds").
  • Region: Search by Country (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland).
• Industry Filtering: Built-in selector for Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes.
• Smart Rate Limiting: Automatically safeguards your API key by throttling requests to ~600ms, adhering strictly to Companies House limits (600 reqs / 5 mins).
• Runtime Estimation: Provides a log estimate of how long your scrape will take before it fully executes.

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📖 Usage Guide

1. Get Your API Key

You need a free API Key from the UK Government:

1. Register at the Companies House Developer Hub.
2. Create a "Live" application.
3. Copy the API Key and paste it into the Actor input.

2. Choose Your Search Strategy

The Actor automatically selects the most specific search mode based on your inputs:

• Priority 1: Postcode Search (Most Specific)
  • Input: Postcode Prefixes = ['EC1', 'EC2']
  • Result: Iterates through each prefix and validates exact matches. Best for targeted territory sales.
• Priority 2: Locality Search
  • Input: Locality = Bristol
  • Result: Searches for companies with "Bristol" in their address.
• Priority 3: Regional/Global Search (Broadest)
  • Input: Country = Scotland (or empty for UK-wide).
  • Result: Returns all companies fitting the date range and SIC codes in that region.

3. Enable Enrichment (Optional)

To get the "Lead Gen" data, check these boxes in the input:

• Include Officers: Adds an officers array to the output (Names, Roles, Appointment Dates).
• Include PSCs: Adds a pscs array (Beneficial Owners, Nature of Control).

⚠️ Note: Enabling enrichment triples the API calls per company (1 for Profile + 1 for Officers + 1 for PSCs). The Actor handles the rate limiting for you, but the run will take longer.

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📦 Output Data Structure

Data is stored in JSON format. Here is a typical enriched result used for lead generation:

{
  "company_number": "12345678",
  "company_name": "EXAMPLE TRADING LTD",
  "incorporation_date": "2023-05-20",
  "company_status": "active",
  "sic_codes": ["62020"],
  "registered_office_address": {
    "address_line_1": "123 Business Park",
    "locality": "Manchester",
    "postal_code": "M50 2EQ",
    "country": "United Kingdom"
  },
  "officer_count": 2,
  "officers": [
    {
      "name": "SMITH, Jane",
      "officer_role": "director",
      "nationality": "British",
      "appointed_on": "2023-05-20",
      "occupation": "Consultant"
    }
  ],
  "psc_count": 1,
  "pscs": [
    {
      "name": "SMITH, Jane",
      "kind": "individual-person-with-significant-control",
      "natures_of_control": ["ownership-of-shares-75-to-100-percent"]
    }
  ],
  "companies_house_profile_url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/12345678"
}

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⚙️ Technical Limits

• Rate Limit: 600 requests per 5 minutes.
• Protection: The Actor waits ~600ms between requests. If you scrape 1,000 companies with full enrichment (~3,000 requests), it will take approximately 30 minutes.
• Volume: You can set Max Results to 0 (Unlimited) to scrape tens of thousands of records. The Actor will run continuously, respecting the rate limit pauses.