UK Company Status Records — Companies House

Keyless. Pay per record. Every UK company's status, filing obligations, and registered profile.

This actor turns the UK Companies House bulk register (BasicCompanyData) into clean, per-company records — the official snapshot of every company on the UK register. Each run reads the government's keyless monthly bulk file and delivers one row per company: its number and name, category and status, incorporation and dissolution dates, registered-office address, SIC activity codes, the accounts and confirmation-statement filing obligations and due dates, mortgage-charge counts, and any previous names. Company/entity grain, structured for engineering use, under the Open Government Licence, with every natural-person field — officers, persons with significant control, and any care-of line — structurally excluded and never emitted.

What this is, in one paragraph

Companies House publishes the complete UK company register as a single monthly bulk file — around 5.5 million companies. This actor reads that file directly and flattens each company into a single analysis-ready record: the registered number and current name, the company category (private limited, PLC, LLP, and so on) and status (active, dissolved, liquidation, and the rest), where and when it was incorporated, its registered-office address, its SIC activity codes, the filing calendar for accounts and confirmation statements with the next-due and last-made-up dates, the count of registered mortgage charges, and any former names. Values are exactly as they stand on the register at the snapshot date. You are billed only for records actually delivered.

Who buys this and for what job

• KYB, onboarding, and compliance products that need to verify a UK company exists, is active, and is current on its filings — as clean rows, not a web lookup.
• Sales-intelligence and lead-enrichment tools segmenting the UK company base by category, status, activity code, region, or incorporation vintage.
• Credit, risk, and diligence teams flagging dissolved, in-liquidation, or overdue-filing companies and reading mortgage-charge counts as a security signal.
• Data engineers who want the register as clean rows without downloading and reshaping a 493 MB monthly zip by hand.

Open Government Licence — free commercial reuse

One licence rider travels on every record. Companies House BasicCompanyData is published under the Open Government Licence v3.0 (OGL v3.0) — free to copy, publish, distribute, and adapt, including commercially, provided the required attribution is given: "Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0." One honest caveat rides every record too: this is the register snapshot as published in the monthly bulk file, not a real-time lookup and not a legal certificate of good standing — for a point-in-time legal position, consult the live Companies House service.

A required partition — this is a 5.5-million-company register

This is a very large register, so this actor requires a partition: every run must set at least one of companyNumberPrefix, companyStatus, or namePrefix. A run with no partition is rejected in code before any work begins — the full 5.5-million-company register cannot be pulled unbounded. This keeps runs bounded, cheap, and purposeful: you pull the active companies, or the companies whose number starts SC (Scotland), or the names beginning with a given string — not the entire country by accident. maxRecords is the hard ceiling on top of the partition. Because the bulk file is a single large member, the actor streams and inflates it on the fly rather than buffering the whole download, and stops as soon as your ceiling is met.

Hard person-gate — companies only, no officers or PSC

This actor emits company entity data only. Officers (directors, secretaries) and persons with significant control (PSC) live in separate Companies House products and are not in this bulk file at all — this actor does not read them and could not emit them. As a structural backstop, the one place a person's name could appear on a company row — a registered-office care-of line — is dropped from the field map entirely, and a person-key guard runs on every record. The acceptance suite feeds a row carrying a populated care-of line and asserts it can never appear in output. The registered-office address itself (a company's statutory address, not a natural-person residence) is retained as company data.

Pricing

Event	Free plan	Bronze	Silver	Gold / Platinum / Diamond
company_record	$0.05	$0.045	$0.04	$0.0335

Delivered before charged. Blocked runs and empty results cost nothing.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
companyNumberPrefix	string	—	Keep only companies whose number starts with these characters (e.g. SC for Scotland, NI for Northern Ireland, OC for LLPs).
companyStatus	string	—	Keep only companies in this status (e.g. Active, Dissolved, Liquidation).
namePrefix	string	—	Keep only companies whose name starts with this text.
maxRecords	integer	500	Ceiling on records delivered and billed.

At least one of companyNumberPrefix, companyStatus, or namePrefix is required.

Output

One JSON object per company. Real example (values as on the register):

{
  "record_id": "08209948",
  "company_number": "08209948",
  "company_name": "! LTD",
  "company_category": "Private Limited Company",
  "company_status": "Active",
  "country_of_origin": "United Kingdom",
  "incorporation_date": "11/09/2012",
  "dissolution_date": null,
  "reg_address_line1": "9 PRINCES SQUARE",
  "reg_post_town": "HARROGATE",
  "reg_country": "ENGLAND",
  "reg_postcode": "HG1 1ND",
  "sic_codes": "82990 - Other business support service activities n.e.c.",
  "accounts_next_due": "2024-06-30",
  "conf_stmt_next_due": "2024-09-24",
  "num_mortgage_charges": "0",
  "source": "UK Companies House (BasicCompanyData)",
  "licence": "UK Companies House company data ... Open Government Licence v3.0 ...",
  "attribution": "Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0 ...",
  "disclaimer": "Company entity, status and filing-obligation records ... officers, PSC ... excluded ...",
  "observed_at": "2026-08-21T00:00:00Z"
}

An unbilled RUN_RECEIPT records the robots check, the resolved bulk file, the partition and filters, source rows seen and delivered, and whether charged equals delivered.

Field reference

Each record is one company. Identity: record_id / company_number, company_name, company_category, and previous_names. Status and lifecycle: company_status, country_of_origin, incorporation_date, and dissolution_date. Registered office: reg_address_line1, reg_address_line2, reg_post_town, reg_county, reg_country, and reg_postcode. Activity: sic_codes (semicolon-joined SIC text lines). Filing obligations: accounts_category, accounts_next_due, accounts_last_made_up, returns_next_due, returns_last_made_up, conf_stmt_next_due, and conf_stmt_last_made_up. Charges: num_mortgage_charges and num_mortgage_outstanding. Reference: uri. Provenance: source, source_url, licence, attribution, disclaimer, and observed_at.

How a run works

A run first re-reads the source host's robots posture from your runtime — the Companies House download host — and stops at the door if a Disallow ever covers the bulk file. It then resolves the newest monthly BasicCompanyDataAsOneFile zip by probing the current and recent months, streams that single-member zip, and inflates the CSV on the fly — without buffering the 493 MB download into memory. Each row is tested against your partition and optional filters; matching companies are flattened to one record — reading only company fields, never an officer, PSC, or care-of line — and delivered before being charged, so a blocked or empty run costs you nothing. The actor stops at your maxRecords ceiling and records charge_equals_delivered in the receipt.

Coverage and scope

The register holds on the order of 5.5 million companies across every category and status. A partition is required precisely because of that scale: companyStatus=Active isolates the live company base, a companyNumberPrefix isolates a jurisdiction or entity type (SC, NI, OC, FC), and a namePrefix isolates a name range. Combine a partition with maxRecords to keep any run cheap and predictable, and pull recurring monthly snapshots to track status changes, new incorporations, and dissolutions over time by joining on company_number.

Cost guidance

One company_record per delivered company: cost = companies delivered × your plan's per-record price. Always scope with a partition and maxRecords. A targeted pull — one status, one number prefix, or one name range — is typically a few hundred to a few thousand companies. 1,000 companies is $50 (Free) / $33.50 (Gold). The full register is millions of rows; scope first, always.

Honest limitations

• Snapshot, not real-time. Records come from the monthly bulk file as published; the live register may have moved since. Not a legal certificate of good standing.
• Partition required. Every run must set a companyNumberPrefix, companyStatus, or namePrefix; the whole register cannot be pulled unbounded.
• As on the register. Status, dates, addresses, and SIC codes are exactly as Companies House publishes them; this actor reformats, it does not verify.
• No person data — officers, persons with significant control, and any care-of line are excluded.

Differentiation

The NexGenData fleet already ships a Companies House watch cell (uk-companies-house-watch, change/monitoring oriented) and a beneficial-ownership cell (uk-psc-beneficial-ownership, the person-level PSC layer). This actor is a distinct third job: the full company-entity register snapshot — status, category, filing obligations, registered office, SIC, and charges for the whole company base — at company grain, with no person data at all. It is not a change feed and not a PSC/ownership product; it is the structured register itself, the table those other cells reference. Buyers who need the ownership people go to the PSC cell; buyers who need change monitoring go to the watch cell; buyers who need the company facts as clean rows come here.

The NexGen Signal family

Part of the NexGen Signal family of pay-per-record data products:

• UK Tariff Commodity Records — HS Codes & Taxonomy
• UK Gender Pay Gap Records — Employer Reports
• UK Contract Opportunity Records
• EU Regulatory Change Records — CELLAR
• Organization Sanctions & LEI Risk

Source: UK Companies House, BasicCompanyData bulk register (download.companieshouse.gov.uk). Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0 — free to reuse, including commercially, with attribution. Register snapshot as published in the monthly bulk file, not a real-time lookup or legal certificate. Company entity data only; officers, persons with significant control, and any care-of line are structurally excluded and never emitted.