The Companies House ID Check Every UK Director Must Pass by November

Nearly every business owner we work with is a director of a UK limited company and a startling number of them have not done this yet. The deadline mechanism is widely misunderstood, and the fix takes about ten minutes.

The short version: Companies House now requires every director to prove they are a real person, the polite phase of the rollout ends in November, and by the end of June roughly 3 million directors, LLP members and people with significant control still had not verified. If you are one of them, here is what you need to know.

What is identity verification, and why is it happening?

Under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act, Companies House stopped being a filing cabinet and became a gatekeeper. For decades anyone could register a company under more or less any name they liked, which is how the register accumulated fictional directors, hijacked identities and several thousand companies at single terraced houses. Identity verification is the fix: every director and person with significant control (PSC) must now prove who they are, once, against photo ID.

Mandatory verification began on 18 November 2025 with a twelve-month transition period for existing directors. That transition ends in November 2026, with 18 November as the backstop date, and Companies House has not been quiet about it: between November and May it sent around 983,000 letters to people who had not complied.

Who does this cover?

More people than the headlines suggest. Directors of every UK limited company, however small and however dormant, are in scope, and so are members of LLPs and anyone registered as a person with significant control, which typically means shareholders with more than 25%. A couple who each own half of their own company are two verifications, not one. Holding several directorships changes nothing except the value of getting it done: one verification covers all of them, past and future. The official figures suggest PSCs are the furthest behind, at 42% verified by the end of June, probably because plenty of owners do not think of themselves as one.

When is your deadline?

For existing directors, verification is tied to your company's next confirmation statement: the annual filing every company makes. From 18 November 2025, a confirmation statement cannot be filed until every director on the company has verified. So your real deadline is whenever your next statement falls due, and for most companies that date arrives well before the backstop. If your confirmation statement is due in September or October, that is your deadline.

The practical consequence: an unverified director does not just create a personal problem, they block the company's filing. If your statement is overdue because one of three directors never got round to a ten-minute task, the company itself is now non-compliant.

What happens if you ignore it?

Once the transition ends in November 2026, being an unverified director becomes a criminal offence. Companies House can impose financial penalties of up to £5,000, filings stay blocked, and the escalation path runs through director disqualification and, for companies that stop filing altogether, strike-off. The regulator's official figures to the end of June showed only 55% of directors, 50% of LLP members and 42% of PSCs verified, which is precisely why the letter campaign has been so heavy: this is not a fringe problem, it is millions of ordinary business owners who filed the reminder under "later".

None of this needs to apply to you, because the fix is small.

How do you verify, and what does it cost?

Nothing, if you do it directly. The route most people should take is GOV.UK One Login: verify against your passport or driving licence, usually through the identity app, in about ten minutes. You receive a personal code, which then connects to your director record. Do it once and it covers every directorship and PSC role you hold, current and future.

The alternative is verifying through an authorised agent (an ACSP), typically your accountant or solicitor, who may charge for it. If an accountant handles your filings, it is worth one email to confirm who is doing what, because they cannot verify on your behalf without your involvement, and plenty of directors assume this is handled. It is not: the verification is personal.

Two warnings from the letters we have seen circulating. First, verification is free on gov.uk, and any site charging you to "process your Companies House verification" through a lookalike page is a middleman at best. Go direct. Second, new directors have verified at appointment since November 2025, so if you are forming a company or joining a board this autumn, the check is part of the paperwork, not an extra.

Do it tonight, not in November

This is the third deadline we have written up this year, after Shopify's August tracking cut-off and the cookie rule changes, and the pattern never varies: the businesses that handle these things in a quiet week spend ten minutes on them, and the ones that wait handle them as an emergency, at the worst possible moment, with a fine attached. This one is the easiest of the three. Your company's next confirmation statement date is on its public record, free to check, and that date is your real deadline; the verification itself is one sitting with your passport and a cup of tea.

The most useful thing you can do after that is forward this to your co-directors, because their delay blocks your filing, and their to-do lists are no shorter than yours. Then back to running the business, which is where your ten minutes belong.