Every director and person with significant control of a UK company must verify their identity with Companies House, and the transition period for existing companies runs out around mid-November 2026. Companies House estimates 6 to 7 million people are affected. Continuing to act as a director without complying is an offence.
This is the part of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act that reaches every single UK company, not just the large or the regulated. If you are a director of a dormant company you set up years ago and forgot about, it reaches you too.
What changed, and when
Identity verification became a legal requirement on 18 November 2025. New incorporations have required it at the point of registration since autumn 2025. For companies already on the register, that date opened a 12-month transition period to get existing directors and PSCs verified.
That transition closes around mid-November 2026. With 6 to 7 million individuals in scope, the closing months were always going to be congested.
Your deadline is probably earlier than November
This is the detail that catches companies out, and it is worth stating plainly. The transition is built around each company's own filing cycle rather than one national cut-off: companies are expected to have their directors and PSCs verified by the time their confirmation statement falls due within the transition window.
So if your confirmation statement is due in, say, June, your effective deadline was June, not November. Check the date on your own company record rather than working to the headline figure. It is a five-minute check and it is the single most useful thing in this article.
Who has to verify?
| Who | Position |
|---|---|
| New directors and PSCs | Verification at the point of incorporation, already in force |
| Existing directors and PSCs | During the 12-month transition, by the confirmation statement date |
| LLP members | In scope |
| People who file at Companies House | From November 2027, with six months notice |
| Corporate directors, corporate PSC officers, limited partnerships | Commencing later, dates to be confirmed |
What happens if someone misses it?
Failing to comply on time is an offence. The published consequences include a financial penalty and being unable to make filings or start new companies. Companies House has also made clear that where an individual carries on acting as a director without complying, the company and its other directors may be committing an offence as well.
That last point is the one worth circulating internally. A single unverified director is not only their own problem, which changes who in the business ought to be tracking it.
Verifying directly or through an ACSP
There are two routes. Verify directly with Companies House, or verify through an Authorised Corporate Service Provider: an individual or organisation carrying out anti-money laundering supervised activity, which covers company formation agents, solicitors, accountants and chartered secretaries. Where an ACSP carries out the check, it must meet the same level of assurance as verifying directly.
For most companies with an accountant already filing on their behalf, the ACSP route is the path of least resistance, and it is worth asking them now rather than in October.
What a company should be able to show
Companies House sets out how verification itself works. What it does not do is keep your internal records for you, and that is where this becomes a documents problem rather than a filing one.
A company in good shape can answer, quickly: who among our directors and PSCs has been verified, when did each of them do it, by which route, and where is the correspondence confirming it. Set against the confirmation statement history, that is a complete picture. Held in one person's inbox, it is a single point of failure, and the person who needs it is rarely the person who has it.
None of this is a statutory retention duty we are inventing for you. It is simply the evidence you will want at hand, and it sits alongside the records you already keep under UK business record retention rules.
What to do in the next fortnight
- Check your confirmation statement date. That is your real deadline, and it may already have passed.
- List every director and PSC, including anyone appointed to a dormant or holding company nobody thinks about.
- Ask your accountant whether they are acting as an ACSP for you, and whether they intend to handle the verifications.
- Record the outcome centrally as each person completes it, rather than leaving the confirmations scattered across individual mailboxes.
For accountancy practices, this arrives in the same season as everything else. Our guide to Making Tax Digital for accountants covers the other side of that workload, and a document management system is how practices keep client evidence straight when several deadlines land together.
Sources: dates, scope and consequences follow the Companies House ECCTA outline transition plan, the rollout announcement and the Changes to UK company law identity verification guidance. Confirm your own dates against your company record.
Law firms carry a parallel set of obligations on client files and retention. Those are covered in legal document management and your SRA obligations.
