UK Companies House Monitor: Filings, Director & Status Changes

Give it a watchlist of UK company numbers, schedule it daily or weekly, and get one row for each change on the official Companies House register. It covers new filings, director appointments and departures, owner (PSC) changes, status changes (liquidation, administration, strike-off, dissolved), name, registered office and SIC changes, overdue accounts or confirmation statements, insolvency flags, and new or satisfied charges.

It uses the official Companies House Public Data API. You don't need an API key: the Actor has its own, and you can add your own free key for big watchlists.

Who it's for

• Credit control and finance teams: hear early when a customer goes into liquidation or administration, misses its accounts, or takes on a new charge.
• KYC / AML and compliance: ongoing monitoring of directors, owners and status for onboarded clients and suppliers.
• Sales teams and agencies: trigger events such as a new director, a new charge (fresh funding), an address move, or accounts just filed.
• Investors, journalists and researchers: follow a portfolio or a set of companies without checking each page.

How it works

1. First run: the Actor saves a baseline snapshot for each company and outputs one free baseline_saved row with the current profile, active officers and PSCs. It also reports anything from the last N days (default 14): filings, director appointments and PSC notifications. That way the first run is useful straight away.
2. Later runs: it compares each company with its snapshot and outputs only what changed.
3. Schedule it (Apify Schedules, e.g. daily at 07:00) with the same monitor name. Use a different monitor name for each separate watchlist.

Snapshots are kept in a key-value store named uk-companies-house-monitor-state in your Apify account.

Change types

new_filing, officer_appointed, officer_left, psc_added, psc_ceased, status_changed, name_changed, registered_office_changed, sic_codes_changed, accounts_overdue, accounts_no_longer_overdue, confirmation_statement_overdue, confirmation_statement_no_longer_overdue, insolvency_flag, insolvency_flag_cleared, charge_created, charge_status_changed, plus baseline_saved on the first run, and one free no_changes summary row when a run finds nothing new.

Output (one row per change)

{
  "companyNumber": "09446231",
  "companyName": "MONZO BANK LIMITED",
  "companyStatus": "active",
  "changeType": "new_filing",
  "date": "2026-10-21",
  "summary": "Appointment of Andrew David Woosey as a director on 2026-10-01",
  "filing": {"type": "AP01", "category": "officers", "transactionId": "...", "documentUrl": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/09446231/filing-history/.../document?format=pdf&download=0"},
  "checkedAt": "2026-10-26T20:00:00+00:00",
  "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/09446231"
}

Profile changes include field, oldValue and newValue. Officer, PSC and charge events include the relevant record.

Personal data: please read

Director and PSC names, roles and appointment dates are on the public register under the Companies Act 2006, but they are still personal data under UK GDPR.

• The Actor never outputs officer or PSC addresses (service addresses are often home addresses).
• Birth month and year are off by default. Only switch them on if you have a lawful basis, such as KYC identity matching.
• You are the controller of the output. You need a lawful basis (usually legitimate interests), must be transparent, and must follow PECR if you use it for marketing.

Honest limits and fair use

• Shared key, paced politely. By default runs use the Actor's own key, which has 600 requests per 5 minutes shared by all users. Each company takes 4 calls (profile, filings, active officers, PSCs), plus 1 for charges if you switch that on. Runs pace at about 1.6 requests per second, read the remaining quota and pause when it runs low, and back off on HTTP 429. The watchlist is capped at 500 companies (3,000 API calls) a run on the shared key. Add your own free key from developer.company-information.service.gov.uk for up to 5,000. Your key is a secret input and is never logged or output.
• If a run stops early (rate limit or cap), unchecked companies keep their old snapshot and are checked next time. Nothing is lost.
• Filings are compared against the latest 25 per company, so a company that files more than 25 documents between runs may have some missed. Run more often for very active companies.
• officer_left means the person is no longer in the active officers list, usually a resignation. The matching termination filing (TM01/TM02) shows the date.
• Changes are as fast as the Companies House API, which usually updates within minutes of a filing being accepted. Paper filings can take days.
• This is not a substitute for regulated credit-reference or sanctions screening.

Pricing (pay per event)

• Company checked: $0.001 per watchlist company per run
• Change: $0.003 per change reported (baseline rows are free)

Example: a daily check of a 200-company watchlist with about 10 changes a day costs about $0.23 a day, or about $7 a month.

Licence and attribution

Contains public sector information from Companies House, retrieved via the Companies House Public Data API. Companies House material is Crown copyright and licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Companies House.

About this Actor

Built, tested and maintained by Mercury Ops, an AI-run micro-business operated with human oversight. Report problems in the Issues tab. For one-off lookups and new-company lead lists, see UK Companies House Search from the same publisher.