First Gazette Notice for Compulsory Strike Off: What It Means and How to Stop It

The Short Answer

A first Gazette notice for compulsory strike off is a public announcement by the Registrar of Companies that they intend to remove your company from the register and dissolve it. It is published in The Gazette, it is copied onto your company's public record at Companies House, and it usually gives two months. Some notices give 28 days. The notice itself says which.

It is a warning, not a decision. Right up to the strike off date, the registrar can discontinue the action, and in the ordinary case they will do exactly that once the overdue filings arrive.

Two things follow from that, and they pull in opposite directions.

The first is that this is one of the most fixable problems in UK company administration. If the cause is overdue accounts or an overdue confirmation statement, filing them is usually the entire solution, and it costs the filing fee plus whatever late filing penalty has already been incurred.

The second is that the clock is real. When the date passes, the company stops existing, the bank account freezes, and everything inside it belongs to the Crown. Getting it back is a paid application, months of waiting, and all the filings you were avoiding in the first place.

This Is Not a Rare Event

It is worth seeing the scale before you panic, because directors who receive one of these tend to assume they have been singled out.

In the quarter from April to June 2026, Companies House recorded 156,515 dissolutions. Of those, 67,815 were compulsory, against 80,643 voluntary dissolutions and 8,057 through liquidation. Compulsory strike off accounts for something like four in every ten companies leaving the register.

Across the full financial year to March 2026 there were 787,120 dissolutions against 815,277 incorporations, and 548,411 companies sitting on the register in some stage of dissolution or liquidation at the year end.

The register is not a static list of live businesses. A large slice of it is companies on the way out, and a large slice of those are on the way out because nobody filed anything.

Why It Happened: The Three Grounds

Most guidance treats compulsory strike off as one thing, "you stopped filing". That is the common route but it is no longer the only one, and the difference matters because the fix is different in each case.

Ground one: the registrar believes the company is not carrying on business

This is section 1000 of the Companies Act 2006. The registrar has reasonable cause to believe the company is not carrying on business or in operation. In practice that belief is formed from the file: overdue accounts, an overdue confirmation statement, no directors on record, or letters coming back undelivered.

Before publishing, the registrar writes to the company. Only when the letters produce nothing does the notice go into The Gazette. This is by far the most common route, and the phrase "company struck off for not filing accounts" describes it accurately.

Ground two: the information used to register the company was false or misleading

The registrar can also act where they reasonably believe that information in the application to register the company was "misleading, false or deceptive in a material particular". This is one of the newer powers, and the timescale is shorter. Strike off can follow not less than 28 days after the Gazette notice, rather than two months.

Ground three: the company is sitting at a default registered office address

If the registrar decides a company does not have an appropriate registered office address, they can move it to a default address held and maintained by Companies House. The company then has 28 days to file a change to a proper address. Miss that, and the registrar can begin strike off.

This ground did not really exist a few years ago, and it catches a specific kind of victim: a live, trading, otherwise compliant company whose registered office was a formation agent, an accountant or a mail forwarding service that has since closed, moved, or failed the appropriate address test.

There is an uncomfortable logic to this one that we have not seen anyone spell out. The statutory warning letters go to the company's registered office. Under this ground, the registered office is an address that Companies House controls and the company does not. If your post was already going somewhere you no longer read, being moved to a default address does not make that better. It is the ground most likely to produce a director who genuinely never saw a single warning.

The Timeline, Precisely

Here is what actually happens, in order.

1. Filings fall overdue. Accounts, confirmation statement, or both. Late filing penalties start running on the accounts immediately.
2. Companies House writes to the registered office. Usually more than once.
3. The first Gazette notice is published. It states the registrar's intention to strike the company off unless given reason not to, and it states the date. A copy goes on the company's public record the same week.
4. Two months pass. Or 28 days, on the false information and default address grounds.
5. The company is struck off and dissolved. A second notice, the final Gazette notice, confirms it. The company ceases to exist from the date of that notice.

Two practical points about step four that the official framing hides.

Two months is not two months of usable time. The countdown runs from the notice, not from the day you find out. Most directors discover this because a customer's credit check flagged it, or an accountant spotted it, and by then two or three weeks are gone. Filings then have to be prepared, submitted and processed. If you are filing accounts for two overdue years, that is real work with a real lead time.

Postal objections have their own earlier deadline. A written objection sent by post or email must arrive at least two weeks before the strike off date. Online objections can be made up to the date itself. If you are a creditor relying on the post, your deadline is not the date printed in the notice.

One other thing worth flagging, because it appears on the first page of Google results for this exact query: at least one widely read guide currently describes the notice as giving three months. It does not. It is two months, or 28 days on the shorter grounds, and the notice itself is the authority. Read the notice, not a summary of it.

How to Stop It, If It Is Your Company

There is no form and no fee for stopping a compulsory strike off. You remove the reason for it.

Work out what is missing. Look at the company's filing history on the public register. It will show the overdue accounts, the overdue confirmation statement, or the default address. Do not rely on memory, and do not rely on your accountant having done it, check the register itself.

File everything that is overdue. Accounts first, since they carry the penalties. Then the confirmation statement, then any outstanding director, PSC or address changes. If the ground was the default registered office, file the change of registered office within the 28 days.

Pay the late filing penalty. It is separate from the strike off and it does not go away when the strike off is discontinued. For a private company the penalties are £150 up to a month late, £375 between one and three months, £750 between three and six months, and £1,500 beyond six months. If you filed late in the previous financial year as well, those figures double.

Tell Companies House what you have done. Once the filings are accepted, the strike off action is normally discontinued and a further notice appears on the record confirming that. If the date is close, contact them and say the filings are in.

Then find out why the post was not reaching you. This is the step people skip, and it is the one that stops it happening again. Change the registered office to somewhere you or your accountant actually monitor, register for email reminders from Companies House, and check that the authentication code is held by someone still involved in the business.

If the company genuinely has stopped trading and you want it closed, do not simply let the strike off run. A planned closure and an abandoned one end in the same place on the register and in very different places for your money. Our guide to closing a limited company sets out the DS01 route, the order to get cash out in, and the tax decision that costs the most when it is made backwards. If the company is dormant rather than finished, our guide to dormant companies covers what you still have to file to keep it alive quietly.

How to Object, If It Is Someone Else's Company

Any interested party can object to a company being struck off. In practice objectors are creditors, landlords, employees owed wages, parties to live litigation, and HMRC.

Objections are made through the Companies House strike off objections service, or in writing to the registrar. Supporting evidence has to meet four conditions:

• It must be less than six months old
• It must clearly show the company's full name, including the correct name ending
• It must support your reason for objecting, for example invoices proving the company owes you money
• Each document must be under 4MB

That first condition catches people. An unpaid invoice from two years ago, on its own, is not enough. You need something recent: a demand letter, a statement, a chase email, correspondence with the company, proof of ongoing proceedings. If your evidence is old, generate new evidence before you object.

If the objection is accepted, the strike off is suspended, in the usual case for six months, and the company stays on the register. Objectors who keep the objection live can generally get further extensions while they pursue the debt.

Our view on this, and it is a strong one: objecting is the cheapest piece of leverage in English commercial life. It costs nothing. It takes about ten minutes. And it removes the debtor's exit. A statutory demand followed by a winding up petition runs into thousands of pounds before you know whether you will see any of it. An objection to strike off costs a scanned invoice, and it converts a company that was about to quietly evaporate into a company that has to deal with you. We would not describe it as a substitute for proper debt recovery, but as a first move it is close to free and it buys six months.

The mirror image is worth understanding if you are the director. If a creditor objects, the strike off stops and the company stays alive with all its filing obligations intact and its debts intact. Abandoning a company with unpaid creditors is not a closure strategy. It is a delay, and the delay is under the creditor's control, not yours.

What Happens If You Let It Run

The company is dissolved on the date of the final Gazette notice. From that moment:

Everything the company owns passes to the Crown as bona vacantia. Cash in the bank, unbanked cheques, refunds that had not arrived yet, stock, vehicles, equipment, domain names, intellectual property, and any debts owed to the company. The bank account is frozen and the balance goes to the Crown.

Refunds you had forgotten about go too. This is the one that stings. A corporation tax overpayment or a VAT repayment that lands after dissolution does not come back to you. It lands in a dead company and belongs to the Crown.

Contracts, leases and licences fall into uncertainty. A dissolved company cannot be a party to anything. Landlords, suppliers and customers all have to work out where that leaves them, and generally they do not enjoy it.

Your exposure as a director does not end. Since 15 December 2021, the Insolvency Service can investigate the conduct of directors of dissolved companies and bring disqualification proceedings without restoring the company first. Disqualification runs from two to fifteen years, and compensation orders are available where creditors have lost money. Personal guarantees survive untouched, because they were never the company's obligation. An overdrawn director's loan account is an asset of the company, which means it is now an asset of the Crown, and it is one of the assets the Crown does chase.

Here is a worked example, because the numbers make it concrete.

A trading company is struck off with £18,400 in the bank and a £2,900 VAT repayment in the system. Both go to the Crown. To get them back the former director applies for administrative restoration: £341 to Companies House on form RT01, a waiver letter from the Bona Vacantia Division which is a separate application with its own fee, two years of overdue accounts prepared and filed, an overdue confirmation statement, and late filing penalties which, at two successive late years on a private company, can be £1,500 doubled to £3,000 on the worst year alone. Add the professional fees to prepare late accounts at speed and the round trip to recover £21,300 costs a meaningful fraction of it, takes months, and starts with a form you could have avoided by filing on time.

Restoration, Briefly

If the company was struck off by the registrar under section 1000 or 1001, administrative restoration is available. It is made on form RT01 by a former director or member, within six years of dissolution, and it requires that the company was carrying on business or in operation at the time it was struck off. All outstanding documents have to be brought up to date and all penalties paid. The Companies House fee fell from £468 to £341 on 1 February 2026, and plenty of guidance still quotes the old figure.

Otherwise, restoration is by court order, which means a claim form, a witness statement, court fees, the registrar's costs and, realistically, a solicitor.

There is a quiet asymmetry here that we wrote about in our closing a limited company guide and that is worth repeating from this side. Administrative restoration is available where the registrar struck the company off. It is not available where the directors applied to be struck off voluntarily under section 1003. The neglected company has the cheap route back. The responsibly closed one does not.

Our View

The notice is a credit event before it is a legal event. The Gazette is machine readable and it is scraped continuously. Credit reference agencies, supplier onboarding tools, bank fraud systems and procurement platforms pick up a first Gazette notice within days. We have watched a company lose a supplier credit account and have a card facility pulled while the director was still working out what the letter meant. The legal consequence takes two months. The commercial consequence takes about seventy two hours, and unlike the strike off it does not get cleanly reversed when the action is discontinued. If you take one thing from this page, treat the notice as urgent for commercial reasons even if you are confident about the legal timescale.

Compulsory strike off is not a cheap closure, it is an expensive one that arrives later. Directors do let it happen deliberately, and the appeal is obvious: no fee, no forms, no conversations. What that actually buys is the loss of everything left in the company, no control over timing, no ability to plan the extraction of funds, and since 2021, no protection from investigation. The DS01 route costs £13. There is no version of this arithmetic where letting it happen is the cheaper option.

Almost every one of these starts with post. Not fraud, not insolvency, not bad faith. A director moved house. An accountant resigned and nobody changed the registered office. A formation agent's address stopped being valid. The company kept trading and kept invoicing while its statutory correspondence went to a building nobody visits. The register is full of solvent, functioning businesses that came within weeks of being deleted because of an address. Registered office maintenance is dull, unbillable and about as high leverage as compliance work gets.

The filing that triggers it is usually the confirmation statement, not the accounts. Accounts have a deadline everyone recognises and a penalty that arrives in the post. The confirmation statement has neither. It carries no automatic financial penalty, it feels like paperwork, and it is the one that quietly convinces the registrar that nobody is home. If you are triaging a company that has fallen behind, look at that first.

If you are a creditor, watch The Gazette for your debtors. Most small businesses find out that a customer has been dissolved when they try to chase an invoice and discover there is nobody to chase. The notices are public, free and searchable. Checking your aged debtors against the register once a quarter is a twenty minute job that occasionally saves a five figure sum. Our guide to trade receivables covers the wider credit control discipline this belongs to.

Common Mistakes We See

• Assuming the notice means the decision is made. It is not. Strike off action is discontinued routinely once the filings arrive.
• Counting from the day you found out. The clock runs from the notice date printed in The Gazette.
• Filing the accounts and stopping. The confirmation statement is usually overdue too, and it is often the real trigger.
• Thinking the late filing penalty disappears. It does not. Discontinuing the strike off has no effect on penalties already incurred.
• Objecting with old evidence. Supporting documents have to be less than six months old.
• Letting it run because the company is empty. Check first. Undrawn balances, unclaimed refunds and forgotten deposits turn up in most of the companies people describe as empty.
• Fixing the filings but not the address. If the post still goes nowhere, you will be back here next year.
• Believing dissolution ends the story for directors. It has not since December 2021.

How IAK Can Help

Most of the work in stopping a compulsory strike off is unglamorous and time critical: reconstructing a set of accounts for a year that was never properly bookkept, getting them filed to a fixed date, and clearing everything else on the record behind them.

We do that work at short notice. We will look at the public filing history, tell you precisely what is missing and what the realistic timetable is, prepare and file the overdue accounts and confirmation statements, deal with Companies House on the discontinuation, and get the bookkeeping and Xero setup into a state where the next deadline is a non event rather than a crisis. Where the company also has overdue corporation tax, VAT or payroll positions, which it usually does, we will deal with those in the same piece of work rather than sending you somewhere else.

If the company has already been dissolved, we can advise on whether administrative restoration is available to you and what it will take, and if the company should be closed rather than rescued, we will tell you that too.

We work with a lot of small businesses, construction companies and property developers, where a struck off company mid project is a genuinely serious problem for contracts, retentions and lending.

If a notice has appeared against your company, or you have just realised your filings are years behind, get in touch. The first conversation is free and it usually takes about fifteen minutes to establish whether the date is comfortable, tight, or already gone.

Sources

• Striking off or dissolving a limited company, GOV.UK, on the grounds on which the registrar may strike off a company, the letters sent before publication, the two month and 28 day Gazette periods, objections by interested parties, the freezing of the bank account and the passing of assets to the Crown as bona vacantia. Last updated 4 December 2025.
• Companies Act 2006, section 1000, legislation.gov.uk, on the registrar's power to strike off a company believed not to be carrying on business or in operation.
• Companies Act 2006, section 1024, legislation.gov.uk, on administrative restoration, who may apply, the six year time limit and the requirement that the company was carrying on business at the time of striking off.
• Apply to object to a company being struck off, Companies House, on the objection service, the two month and 28 day notice periods, the two week deadline for objections sent by post or email, and the four conditions supporting evidence must meet.
• Companies register activities statistical release, April 2025 to March 2026, GOV.UK, on 787,120 dissolutions, 815,277 incorporations, the total register size of 5,479,045 and the 548,411 companies in the process of dissolution or liquidation.
• Incorporated companies in the UK, April to June 2026, GOV.UK, on the quarterly split of 156,515 dissolutions into 80,643 voluntary, 67,815 compulsory and 8,057 via liquidation.
• Late filing penalties, Companies House, on the penalty bands for private companies and the doubling of penalties where accounts were filed late in the previous financial year.
• Companies House fees from 1 February 2026, Inform Direct, on the reduction of the administrative restoration fee from £468 to £341 and the reduction of the voluntary strike off fee to £13.
• Rating (Coronavirus) and Directors Disqualification (Dissolved Companies) Act 2021, legislation.gov.uk, on the extension of the Insolvency Service's investigation and disqualification powers to directors of dissolved companies without restoration.
• Company restoration guide, GOV.UK, on restoration by court order, the claim form and witness statement, the registrar's costs and the bona vacantia waiver letter.