# Companies House Scraper – UK Company Data, Filings & Charges (`rowfeed/companies-house-scraper`) Actor

Official UK Companies House data: company status, SIC codes, registered office, accounts and confirmation statement dates, filing history and registered charges. Never touches officers or persons with significant control - no named individuals, ever.

- **URL**: https://apify.com/rowfeed/companies-house-scraper.md
- **Developed by:** [Rowfeed](https://apify.com/rowfeed) (community)
- **Categories:** Business, Developer tools
- **Stats:** 2 total users, 1 monthly users, 100.0% runs succeeded, 0 bookmarks
- **User rating**: No ratings yet

## Pricing

from $3.00 / 1,000 companies

This Actor is paid per event. You are not charged for the Apify platform usage, but only a fixed price for specific events.

Learn more: https://docs.apify.com/actors/running/actors-in-store.md#pay-per-event

## What's an Apify Actor?

An Actor is a serverless cloud program that runs on the Apify platform. It has two run modes.
In Batch mode, an Actor accepts a well-defined JSON input, performs an action which can take anything from a few seconds to a few hours,
and optionally produces a well-defined JSON output, datasets with results, or files in key-value store.
In Standby mode, an Actor provides a web server which can be used as a website, API, or an MCP server.

Apify vocabulary and the platform model are defined once, in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md.

## How to integrate an Actor?

If asked about integration, you help developers integrate Actors into their projects.
You adapt to their stack and deliver integrations that are safe, well-documented, and production-ready.

Do not guess an integration path. Every one of them is in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md: the Apify MCP server, Agent Skills with the Apify CLI, the JavaScript and Python clients, the REST API, and the account-free path for an agent with no human to sign in. It also carries the rule on stating cost before the first paid run.

For examples already wired to this Actor's own input schema, see the [API](#api) section below.

Each client library has reference documentation the quickstart does not restate: [JavaScript/TypeScript](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs.md) (`npm install apify-client`) and [Python](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs.md) (`pip install apify-client`).

# README

## Companies House Scraper – UK Company Data, Filings & Charges

Get official UK company data as clean JSON rows: status, SIC codes, registered office address, accounts and confirmation statement dates, filing history and registered charges (mortgages).
Built for due-diligence tools, lead lists, credit and risk checks, and researchers who need real Companies House data without scraping HTML or paying for named-officer data they don't need.
Every field comes straight from the official UK government register, `api.company-information.service.gov.uk`, with retries and a clean error row when a company number does not exist.

### What you get

- **Every company as one row** – company number, name, status, type, incorporation and cessation dates, jurisdiction, SIC codes, registered office address, next accounts and confirmation statement due dates, and a link to the public Companies House page.
- **Filing history and charges on request** – recent filings (date, type, category, description) and registered mortgages/charges (creation date, classification, status, and a *count* of the parties entitled — never their names).
- **Search or exact lookup** – a free-text search (company name or keyword) filtered by status, or an exact list of company numbers that takes priority over the search.

### No personal data, ever

This Actor never calls the officers or persons-with-significant-control endpoints and never outputs a named individual, date of birth, or residential address. Registered office addresses (the company's own address, not a person's) are included because they are public company data. This is a deliberate limit, not an oversight: it is what lets this Actor use the Open Government Licence's commercial-reuse terms cleanly.

### Sample row

One row from a real run with `includeFilingHistory: true` (filing history trimmed to 3 of the 10 fetched items below; every field is unedited):

```json
{
  "company_number": "SC312953",
  "company_name": "RENEWABLE ENERGY ADVISORY LTD.",
  "company_status": "active",
  "company_type": "ltd",
  "date_of_creation": "2006-12-04",
  "date_of_cessation": null,
  "jurisdiction": "scotland",
  "sic_codes": ["99999"],
  "registered_office_address": {
    "address_line_1": "Torridon House",
    "address_line_2": "Torridon Lane",
    "locality": "Off Grampian Road",
    "postal_code": "KY11 2EU",
    "region": "Rosyth"
  },
  "accounts_next_due": "2026-09-30",
  "accounts_last_made_up_to": "2024-12-31",
  "confirmation_statement_next_due": "2026-12-18",
  "has_charges": false,
  "has_insolvency_history": false,
  "can_file": true,
  "companies_house_url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/SC312953",
  "scraped_at": "2026-09-23T08:47:46+00:00",
  "filing_history": [
    { "date": "2025-12-10", "type": "CS01", "category": "confirmation-statement", "description": "confirmation-statement-with-no-updates" },
    { "date": "2025-09-17", "type": "AA", "category": "accounts", "description": "accounts-with-accounts-type-dormant" },
    { "date": "2024-12-05", "type": "CS01", "category": "confirmation-statement", "description": "confirmation-statement-with-no-updates" }
  ]
}
```

With `includeCharges: true`, each row also gets `charges` (`[{created_on, classification, status, persons_entitled_count}, ...]`) and `charges_total` — for example TESCO PLC (00445790) currently has 9 charges on file, the newest an "Account security agreement" created 2009-11-04, `persons_entitled_count: 1`, no names.

### Filters

| Input | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| `searchQuery` | `renewable energy` | Free-text company search, used when `companyNumbers` is empty. |
| `companyNumbers` | `[]` | Exact company numbers, e.g. `["00445790"]`. Takes priority over `searchQuery`. |
| `maxCompanies` | `25` | Maximum company rows returned (up to 1000). |
| `companyStatus` | `active` | `active`, `dissolved`, or `all`. Applied when searching; ignored when `companyNumbers` is set. |
| `includeFilingHistory` | `true` | Fetch each company's recent filing history. |
| `filingHistoryLimit` | `10` | Filing history items per company. |
| `includeCharges` | `false` | Fetch registered mortgages/charges (counts of parties entitled, no names). |

### Pricing

Pay per event, no subscription: **$3 per 1,000 companies**, **$0.007 per run start**, and **$1 per 1,000 detail fetches** (charged once per company when filing history or charges were actually fetched). A default run (25 active companies, filing history on, charges off) costs about $0.007 + 25 × ($0.003 + $0.001) = $0.107.

### Details

- **Source**: the official UK Companies House Public Data API (`api.company-information.service.gov.uk`), Crown copyright data.
- **Rate limiting**: a conservative global limit of at most 2 requests/second, independent of the 600-requests-per-5-minutes budget the API key shares with every other user of the same key. HTTP 429 is retried honouring the `Retry-After` header with exponential backoff.
- **Reliability**: 5xx and network errors are retried (5 tries, exponential backoff); a bad company number returns a clean error row (`company_number`, `error: "not_found"`, `errorMessage`) instead of stopping the run, and the run still exits successfully. A run fails only when it produced no rows *and* hit real request failures (network, rate limit, blocked).
- **Run stats**: the `STATS` record in the run's key-value store holds request and error counts per category (`network`, `rate_limit`, `blocked`, `not_found`, `other`).
- **Output**: one dataset row per company. The Overview table shows company name, number, status, type, incorporation date and next accounts due date. Export as JSON, CSV or Excel, fetch through the Apify API, or schedule runs.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Not affiliated with Companies House.

# Actor input Schema

## `searchQuery` (type: `string`):

Free-text company search (company name or keyword), used when companyNumbers is empty. Same search as the Companies House website.

## `companyNumbers` (type: `array`):

Exact Companies House company numbers to fetch, e.g. \["00445790"]. Takes priority over searchQuery: if this list is not empty, searchQuery is ignored.

## `maxCompanies` (type: `integer`):

Maximum number of company rows to return. Each row is one `company` event ($3 per 1,000).

## `companyStatus` (type: `string`):

Keep only companies with this status when searching by searchQuery: active, dissolved, or all. Ignored when companyNumbers is set.

## `includeFilingHistory` (type: `boolean`):

Fetch each company's recent filing history (accounts, confirmation statements, officer changes as filing events, not personal data). Counts toward one `detail` event per company ($1 per 1,000) together with includeCharges.

## `filingHistoryLimit` (type: `integer`):

Maximum number of filing history items to include per company when includeFilingHistory is on.

## `includeCharges` (type: `boolean`):

Fetch mortgages and charges registered against each company (counts only, no names of the people or entities entitled). Counts toward one `detail` event per company ($1 per 1,000) together with includeFilingHistory.

## Actor input object example

```json
{
  "searchQuery": "renewable energy",
  "companyNumbers": [
    "00445790"
  ],
  "maxCompanies": 25,
  "companyStatus": "active",
  "includeFilingHistory": true,
  "filingHistoryLimit": 10,
  "includeCharges": false
}
```

# Actor output Schema

## `results` (type: `string`):

No description

# API

You can run this Actor programmatically using our API. Below are code examples in JavaScript, Python, and CLI, as well as the OpenAPI specification and MCP server setup.

## JavaScript example

```javascript
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

// Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
// Replace the '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token
const client = new ApifyClient({
    token: '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>',
});

// Prepare Actor input
const input = {};

// Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
const run = await client.actor("rowfeed/companies-house-scraper").call(input);

// Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if any)
console.log('Results from dataset');
console.log(`💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/${run.defaultDatasetId}`);
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
items.forEach((item) => {
    console.dir(item);
});

// 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs

```

## Python example

```python
from apify_client import ApifyClient

# Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
# Replace '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token.
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")

# Prepare the Actor input
run_input = {}

# Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
run = client.actor("rowfeed/companies-house-scraper").call(run_input=run_input)

# Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if there are any)
print(f"💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/{run.default_dataset_id}")
for item in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(item)

# 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs/quick-start

```

## CLI example

```bash
echo '{}' |
apify call rowfeed/companies-house-scraper --silent --output-dataset

```

## MCP server setup

```json
{
    "mcpServers": {
        "apify": {
            "type": "http",
            "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch-actor-details,rowfeed/companies-house-scraper"
        }
    }
}
```

The hosted server signs you in with OAuth on first connect, so no API token belongs in this config. Clients without OAuth support can send an `Authorization: Bearer <APIFY_API_TOKEN>` header instead, using a token from API & Integrations in Apify Console (https://console.apify.com/settings/integrations).

## OpenAPI specification

Download the OpenAPI definition: https://api.apify.com/v2/actors/OWlrXtHR3WRIOXHfL/builds/2CEBxMSXkdfdjnD6u/openapi.json