Companies House ID Verification: The 2026 Deadline Every UK Director Needs to Know

UK company directors have a compliance deadline landing this autumn that's easy to miss if it isn't flagged directly: identity verification with Companies House, mandatory under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, has to be completed by every existing director, LLP member and Person with Significant Control before their company's next confirmation statement falls due within the transition window.

The requirement itself isn't new. Identity verification became mandatory for any newly appointed director or PSC from 18 November 2025 — since that date, a new appointment simply cannot be recorded on the public register until the person has verified their identity and obtained a Companies House personal code. What's landing now is the deadline for everyone who was already a director or PSC before that date, who were given a 12-month transition window to complete the same check.

Who exactly needs to verify comes down to three groups. Company directors are the most obvious category. Persons with Significant Control — broadly, anyone owning or controlling more than 25% of a company's shares or voting rights, or otherwise exercising significant influence over it — are the second. LLP members are treated the same way as directors for these purposes. A further group, covering agents and presenters who file documents at Companies House on a company's behalf, is also due to come into scope; Companies House has already pushed that specific rollout back once, from an original spring 2026 target to no earlier than November 2026, and it doesn't have a firm confirmed date at the time of writing.

Directors and PSC-who-are-also-directors share the same clock — their verification is tied to their company's confirmation statement date, as explained below. A PSC who isn't also a director works to a different rule entirely: their verification window is the first 14 days of their own birth month during the transition year, unconnected to when the company's confirmation statement falls due. Anyone advising a company with an individual PSC who holds no directorship should check that person's birth month specifically, rather than assuming the company's own filing date covers them.

The mechanism that actually enforces this is worth understanding precisely, because it's less dramatic than an immediate fine and more like a compliance trap that builds pressure over time. An unverified existing director or PSC blocks their company's confirmation statement from being accepted once that statement falls due within the transition window. Failing to file a confirmation statement is itself a separate offence under existing company law, carrying its own risk of financial penalties and, ultimately, the company being struck off the register entirely. In practical terms, an unverified director doesn't trigger an immediate fine the day the transition window closes — it triggers a filing rejection at the company's own confirmation statement date, which then cascades into the older, already-established consequences of a late or missing confirmation statement.

Once enforcement fully applies, the individual consequences of non-compliance escalate further: failing to verify becomes a criminal offence carrying a fine, alongside the risk of director disqualification for persistent non-compliance with filing requirements. It's worth being precise about the fine itself here, since figures circulating in some coverage of this reform have varied — the most specific, detailed sourcing available points to fines of up to £5,000 per individual, not the higher figures sometimes quoted elsewhere.

There are two routes to actually completing verification. The direct route is free: verification through GOV.UK One Login offers three sub-methods — a biometric check via the smartphone app using NFC to read a passport or biometric residence permit chip, an online security-questions route that doesn't require NFC hardware at all, or an in-person document check at a participating Post Office. In practice, the app route is the one that most often fails for overseas directors: it needs a UK biometric passport, a biometric residence permit, or another NFC-chipped document the app can actually scan, and directors holding an older non-biometric passport or a phone without NFC hit a dead end there regardless of how straightforward their situation otherwise is. The security-questions and Post Office routes exist precisely to catch people the app can't handle, though both tend to be slower.

The indirect route runs through an Authorised Corporate Service Provider — typically an accountant or solicitor already supervised under UK anti-money-laundering rules — who verifies the individual's identity on Companies House's behalf, for a fee the ACSP itself sets, and then files the verification electronically rather than the individual completing it themselves through GOV.UK One Login at all. This route tends to be the more practical option for non-UK residents, overseas directors of UK companies without a biometric passport or NFC-capable phone, or anyone facing repeated failures with the GOV.UK app — since an ACSP can build a fuller AML/KYC evidence pack around a government photo ID and proof of address rather than depending on a single digital scan succeeding.

Once verified, an individual receives a Companies House personal code — an 11-character alphanumeric identifier formatted as three groups separated by dashes, for example FT5-15ED-7JY5, tied to that person rather than to any one company. Someone holding multiple directorships only needs to verify once and can reuse the same code across every company they're involved with. This is a genuinely different thing from a company's own authentication code, which is a separate credential companies use to authorise filings on their behalf. Confusing the two is a common, avoidable mistake: the personal code identifies the verified individual; the company authentication code identifies the company making a filing. Existing directors provide their personal code when their company files its next confirmation statement during the transition window, rather than through a separate standalone submission.

Multiple directorships create a specific timing trap worth flagging on its own: someone who directs several companies doesn't get to choose which company's confirmation statement date governs their personal deadline. In practice, whichever of their companies has the earliest confirmation statement date sets the effective deadline for that individual, since verification has to be complete before that filing can go through — meaning a director spread across several companies should check the earliest of all their confirmation statement dates, not just the one for the company they happen to be thinking about first.

A related reform worth flagging alongside identity verification, since it affects the same annual filing: private companies can no longer keep their register of members on the central register at Companies House, a change that took effect 26 January 2026. Any company that had previously elected to use that central register option needs to bring its register of members back in-house. Separately, companies affected by this change face a one-off requirement to provide a full list of shareholder names and shareholdings with their next confirmation statement following the reform — a genuine increase in transparency obligations landing at effectively the same moment as the identity verification deadline.

For a director or company secretary working through this before their own confirmation statement date arrives, the practical checklist is straightforward: confirm which of your company's directors, LLP members and PSCs were appointed before 18 November 2025 and therefore fall under the transition window; check your company's specific confirmation statement date, since that's what actually triggers the individual deadline rather than a single fixed date for every company, and check the earliest confirmation statement date across every company for anyone holding multiple directorships; separately flag any PSC who isn't also a director and note their birth month, since their personal deadline runs on that basis rather than the company's filing date; decide, for each in-scope individual, whether the free GOV.UK One Login route or a paid ACSP is the more practical path, particularly for any overseas directors without a biometric passport or NFC-capable phone; confirm whether your company previously elected to use the central register for its register of members and, if so, that it's been brought back in-house; and build in enough lead time before the confirmation statement is actually due, since an ACSP-mediated verification for someone without a UK passport or driving licence can take considerably longer to arrange than the biometric app check most UK-resident directors can complete in a single sitting.