What Is a Confirmation Statement? The Companies House Rules in 2026

What Is a Confirmation Statement?

A confirmation statement is the annual filing every UK company makes to tell Companies House that the information held about it on the public register is correct. The form is called CS01. It replaced the old annual return in June 2016, and the change of name was deliberate: you are not filing new information, you are confirming what is already there.

Every company has to file one. That includes companies limited by shares, companies limited by guarantee, LLPs, and, importantly, companies that have never traded a penny. Dormancy is not an exemption. If the company exists on the register, it owes a confirmation statement every year until it is struck off or dissolved.

It contains no financial information at all. It says nothing about turnover, profit or what the company owns. That is the job of the annual accounts, which are a separate filing with separate deadlines and a very different penalty regime. Confusing the two is one of the most common causes of a company getting into trouble with Companies House.

For most companies this is a ten minute job. In 2026 it stopped being reliably so, for reasons we come to below.

What the Confirmation Statement Actually Confirms

You are confirming that the register is accurate on your confirmation statement date. The fields in question are:

• The registered office address, and any single alternative inspection location
• The registered email address, which became compulsory for all companies with statement dates from 5 March 2024
• The directors and company secretary, with their service addresses and dates of birth
• The SIC codes describing what the business does
• The statement of capital, meaning the number and class of shares and the amount paid up
• The shareholders, and any share transfers during the period
• The people with significant control, usually anyone holding more than 25 percent of shares or voting rights
• A lawful purpose statement, confirming the company's intended future activities are lawful, also compulsory since 5 March 2024
• From 18 November 2025, an identity verification statement for the directors

The lawful purpose statement is worth pausing on. It is a single tickbox, it takes no time, and you cannot file without it. Companies House added it so that a company used for fraud cannot later claim nobody ever asked. It is a low friction requirement with a long tail, and directors should read it as the declaration it is rather than the formality it looks like.

What It Does Not Do

Here is the misunderstanding we correct most often, and it causes real problems.

Filing a confirmation statement does not update the register. For most fields it only confirms what is already recorded. If you appointed a director eight months ago and never filed form AP01, the confirmation statement does not fix that. If you moved office and never filed AD01, the confirmation statement does not fix that either. Those changes have to be filed separately, and they have to be filed before or at the same time as the statement.

Only three things can actually be changed on the CS01 itself:

1. SIC codes
2. The statement of capital
3. Shareholder information and share transfers

Everything else, meaning directors, secretaries, registered office, registered email and PSC details, needs its own form first.

This matters more than it sounds, because if you tick the box confirming the register is correct when it is not, you have not just failed to update something. You have made a false confirmation, and that is a different kind of problem from a late filing. In practice the risk is almost always innocent: a small company appoints a spouse as a second director over a dinner conversation, nobody files anything, and the omission surfaces two years later when a lender runs a check. But the fix gets more awkward the longer it sits there.

When Is It Due?

The rule is simple, and the arithmetic trips people up anyway.

Your company has a review period of 12 months. The first one runs from the date of incorporation. Every one after that runs from the date of your last confirmation statement. You then have 14 days after the end of the review period to file.

So a company incorporated on 3 September 2025 has a first review period ending 2 September 2026, and must file by 16 September 2026.

Two details catch people out:

You can file early, but it resets the clock. If you file before the review period ends, you choose a new confirmation statement date, and the next 12 months run from there. That is occasionally useful, for example if you want your filing to land at a quieter point in your year, but it is not free of consequence.

The 14 days are calendar days. There is no equivalent of the "next working day" grace you get elsewhere in tax. Companies House sends an email reminder if you have signed up for one, and the single most effective thing a director can do is make sure that reminder goes to an address somebody actually reads. We have seen more late statements caused by a former bookkeeper's inbox than by anything else.

What Does a Confirmation Statement Cost?

£50 to file online. £110 on paper.

Those figures went up on 1 February 2026, from £34 and £62 respectively. Companies House increased fees across the board to fund the powers it gained under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, and the confirmation statement took a 47 percent rise. Digital incorporation doubled at the same time, from £50 to £100.

One feature of the fee is genuinely useful and almost nobody uses it. The fee covers a 12 month payment period, not a single filing. Once you have paid it with your first statement in that period, you can file as many further confirmation statements as you like at no extra cost. If your shareholding is changing during the year, or you want the public record brought up to date before a funding round or a sale, you can refile without paying again. There is no marginal cost to keeping the register current, only the marginal effort.

The paper form costs more than twice as much and takes considerably longer to process. There is no good reason to use it unless you have been excluded from the online service.

The Change That Matters Most in 2026: Identity Verification

This is the part that turns a routine filing into something you have to plan for.

Under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, everyone who runs or controls a UK company has to prove who they are to Companies House. Verification opened voluntarily on 8 April 2025 and became a legal requirement on 18 November 2025. Companies House estimates that six to seven million people need to go through it.

Rather than invent a new deadline, Companies House attached the requirement to the filing that every company already makes. The confirmation statement is the checkpoint.

Directors

Existing directors provide their Companies House personal code when the company files its next confirmation statement after 18 November 2025. The code is issued once you have verified, either directly through GOV.UK One Login or through an Authorised Corporate Service Provider such as an accountant or a formation agent. It belongs to you, not to the company, so a person who sits on four boards verifies once and uses the same code four times.

The transition period runs for twelve months, ending on 18 November 2026. After that, every director of every UK company should be verified.

The consequence is blunt, and it is the reason we are writing about this in July rather than November: your company cannot file its confirmation statement unless all of its directors are verified. A statement that used to be a four minute job can now be stopped dead by one director who has not got round to it, is travelling, has an expired passport, or does not open their email. The date that actually governs your filing is not your confirmation statement date. It is whenever your least organised co-director sorted out their personal code, which needs to be several weeks earlier.

People with significant control

PSCs verify too, on a different and slightly odd timetable, and they each get a 14 day window to supply their personal code.

• If the PSC is also a director, the window starts the day after the company's confirmation statement date. A confirmation statement date of 31 March 2026 gives a window of 1 to 14 April 2026.
• If the PSC is not a director, the window runs during the first 14 days of their birth month, as recorded on the register. Someone whose date of birth shows as March 1990 has from 1 to 14 March.

Relevant legal entities, meaning corporate PSCs, have no verification requirement at present.

The birth month rule is a genuine oddity and we expect it to be missed at scale. It is a deadline nobody has ever had before, tied to a piece of personal data most shareholders have forgotten is on the public register, arriving in a 14 day window with no natural prompt attached to it. If you have a non-director shareholder above 25 percent, put their birth month in your calendar now.

If someone does not verify

Acting as a director without complying is a criminal offence, and the company and its other directors can be committing an offence as well. Companies House can impose a financial penalty, annotate the public register against the individual's name, and refuse to accept filings. An unverified person cannot be appointed as a new director or register a new company.

What Happens If You Do Not File

The confirmation statement penalty regime is genuinely different from the accounts one, and the difference is not in the direction most people assume.

Annual accounts carry an automatic, escalating, unavoidable civil penalty. For a private company that is £150 if you are up to a month late, £375 for one to three months, £750 for three to six months and £1,500 beyond that, doubled if you were also late the previous year. It arrives without anyone at Companies House making a decision.

The confirmation statement has no automatic penalty at all. Failing to file is a criminal offence under the Companies Act 2006, and the directors are personally liable, with a fine of up to £5,000. Companies House has also had power since 2 May 2024 to impose civil financial penalties directly, and it issues a warning notice first, giving 28 days to put things right.

In practice, the fine is not what happens. What happens is that the company is flagged, and if the statement stays outstanding Companies House begins compulsory strike off. A first Gazette notice appears on the public record, visible to anyone who looks, which in practice means every credit reference agency, every bank compliance team and every procurement department at a prospective customer. If the strike off completes, the company ceases to exist, its bank accounts are frozen and any assets it still holds pass to the Crown as bona vacantia.

So the honest framing is this: the £5,000 figure quoted everywhere is not the risk. The risk is that a forgotten £50 filing quietly becomes a public statement that your company is in the process of being dissolved, at exactly the moment somebody is deciding whether to lend to you or buy from you. Restoring a struck off company is possible and it is expensive, slow and entirely avoidable.

Confirmation Statement vs Annual Accounts

	Confirmation statement	Annual accounts
What it reports	Who owns and runs the company	Financial performance and position
Form	CS01	Full, abridged or micro-entity accounts
Deadline	14 days after the review period ends	9 months after the accounting reference date
Fee	£50 online	No filing fee
Late penalty	Criminal offence, financial penalty, strike off	Automatic £150 to £1,500
Dormant companies	Still required	Still required, in dormant format

Both are due every year, both apply to dormant companies, and their dates usually do not line up, because one runs from incorporation or your last statement and the other runs from your accounting reference date. Two separate clocks is exactly why this gets missed.

How to File, Step by Step

1. Check the register first. Look up your company on the Companies House public record and read what is actually there, rather than what you believe is there.
2. File any changes separately. Director appointments and resignations, registered office moves, PSC changes. These go in before the statement.
3. Make sure every director is verified and has their personal code to hand. Do this weeks ahead, not on the day.
4. Log in to the Companies House filing service and start the confirmation statement.
5. Update SIC codes, share capital and shareholders on the form itself if they have changed.
6. Confirm the lawful purpose statement and the identity verification details.
7. Pay the £50 fee if this is your first statement in the current payment period.
8. Keep the confirmation. File the acknowledgement with your company records, alongside the statutory registers you are also required to maintain.

Dormant Companies Are the Highest Risk Group

A dormant company still owes a confirmation statement, still owes dormant accounts, and now still needs its directors verified.

We see the same pattern repeatedly. Somebody incorporates a company for a plan that did not happen, or to protect a trading name, or because a formation agent bundled it into something else. Nothing ever trades. The reminders go to an old email. Two or three years later the director discovers they are technically a criminal, or that a company bearing their name is publicly listed as facing strike off.

Our view is straightforward. If a company has no purpose, close it properly rather than maintaining it. Voluntary strike off costs £13 online and takes a couple of months. Keeping a dormant shell alive now costs £50 a year, plus dormant accounts, plus the personal identity verification of everyone on the board, for an asset that produces nothing. The only good reasons to keep a dormant company are that you genuinely intend to use it, or that the name has real value you are protecting. Sentiment is not a reason, and neither is the vague feeling that it might be useful one day.

If the company does hold something, a property, a bank balance, retained profits, do not let it be struck off, because those assets go to the Crown. Speak to an accountant about a members' voluntary liquidation or a proper distribution before dissolution.

Do You Need an Accountant to File a Confirmation Statement?

Honestly, no. If nothing has changed, every director is verified and the register is accurate, it is a short online form that a competent director can complete themselves. Anyone charging a large fee purely to press submit is charging for the wrong thing.

The value of having someone do it is not the filing. It is the review that should happen before the filing: noticing the AP01 that was never submitted, spotting that a share transfer two years ago never reached the register, catching that the PSC entry still names a shareholder who was bought out. Those are the errors that cost money later, and they are invisible on the confirmation statement itself, because the form is asking you to confirm the register rather than examine it.

For a company that has never changed anything, do it yourself. For a company where shares have moved, directors have come and gone, or the paperwork has been informal, get someone to look at the register properly once, then keep it clean.

Our View

Companies House chose the right enforcement mechanism and it is going to hurt anyway. Attaching identity verification to an existing annual filing was a sensible design decision. It means nobody has to remember a new deadline, and it gives Companies House a natural gate. But it also means the confirmation statement inherited a dependency it never had before, on the personal admin of every individual director. A filing whose difficulty used to be entirely within one person's control is now hostage to whoever on the board is slowest with paperwork. Companies with a single director and shareholder will barely notice. Companies with four directors, one of whom lives abroad, will notice a great deal.

The 18 November 2026 pinch point is real and underestimated. Confirmation statement dates are spread evenly across the year, so roughly a twelfth of all UK companies have one falling in each of the remaining months of the transition. Everyone who has quietly deferred verification is being funnelled toward the same autumn. If your statement date falls between September and November 2026, treat verification as something to complete now rather than something to do when the reminder arrives.

The fee rise is defensible and the value is not obvious yet. £34 to £50 is a large percentage increase on a small number, and Companies House is honest that it is funding the new powers. The theory is that a register people can trust is worth paying for, and we agree with the theory. Whether the register actually becomes more trustworthy depends on enforcement following verification, and that has not been demonstrated yet. Ask us again in two years.

Treat the register the way you treat the bank account. The habit that prevents almost every problem in this article is filing changes when they happen instead of at statement time. An appointment is a five minute form on the day the decision is made and a small archaeology project eighteen months later. The confirmation statement should be a moment where you confirm something you already know to be true, and if it is ever a moment of discovery, the system upstream has failed.

The people most exposed are the ones who least think of themselves as running a company. Contractors, side businesses, single-property companies, dormant shells. They have all the same obligations as a business with a finance department, and none of the infrastructure. If that is you, the answer is not more diligence. It is putting the whole filing calendar somewhere it cannot be forgotten, which usually means giving it to somebody whose job it is.

How IAK Can Help

For the companies we act for, Companies House filings are part of the service rather than a separate task. That means we hold the confirmation statement date alongside the accounts deadline and the Corporation Tax payment date, we file appointments, resignations, office changes and PSC updates as they happen, and we check the register properly once a year rather than confirming it blind.

On identity verification, we track which of your directors and PSCs are verified, when each of their windows opens, and what still needs doing before your next statement can be filed. If you have a director who is overseas, or a non-director shareholder who has never heard of any of this, that is exactly the situation worth handing over rather than chasing yourself in the fortnight before a deadline.

If you are not sure whether your register is accurate, or you have received a strike off notice, or you have a dormant company you would rather close than keep feeding, contact us for a free consultation. You may also find our guides to sole trader versus limited company, directors' remuneration, dividends and what an accountant actually does useful, and if you are weighing up incorporation in the first place, the admin covered here is part of the real cost of running a limited company.

Sources

• Filing your company's confirmation statement, GOV.UK, on the review period, the 14 day deadline, the lawful purpose statement and the single fee per payment period.
• Companies House fees, GOV.UK, on the £50 digital and £110 paper confirmation statement fee.
• Verifying your identity for Companies House, GOV.UK, on who must verify, the Companies House personal code and the consequences of not verifying.
• When you need to verify your identity for Companies House, GOV.UK, on directors verifying at the next confirmation statement and the PSC 14 day windows.
• Understanding identity verification for people with significant control, Companies House blog, on the birth month rule for non-director PSCs and relevant legal entities.
• Companies House confirms identity verification rollout from 18 November 2025, GOV.UK, on the twelve month transition period.
• Confirmation statement changes, Changes to UK company law, GOV.UK, on the registered email address and lawful purpose statement from March 2024.
• Late filing penalties, GOV.UK, on the £150 to £1,500 automatic penalties that apply to accounts but not to the confirmation statement.
• Companies House approach to financial penalties, GOV.UK, on the warning notice procedure and the 28 day period to comply.