Free UK Company Checker — check any UK limited company

What "company check" actually means

A UK company check is the act of pulling the statutory record for a limited company off Companies House — the government register every limited company, LLP and CIC files into under criminal penalty for false statement. The register is free. Everything you see on this page — accounts, directors, PSCs, charges, insolvency notices — is public data you have a right to see without signing up, paying or handing over an email.

The reason paid checkers exist (Endole, CompanyCheck, DueDil, Creditsafe, Red Flag Alert) is packaging — they layer credit scores, monitoring alerts and outputs on top of the free data. For a one-off check, none of that is necessary. For monitoring 500 suppliers, it is. This tool is the free half; if you need the paid half, our ranked guide to paid checkers says which one honestly fits which job.

What we surface (and where)

• Company profile — legal name, number, incorporation date, registered office, current status. Same as gov.uk, cleaner presentation.
• Directors — every appointed officer with role, appointment date and (if resigned) resignation date. Click through to see every other UK company they sit on the board of.
• PSCs — Persons with Significant Control. The closest thing to a shareholder list in the free register. See our PSC lookup tool for the deep view.
• Filing history — every document filed, with the ability to open the underlying PDF. Late filings are flagged.
• Charges — secured lending against the company. A live floating charge from a bank tells you a lot; from an invoice-finance provider tells you more.
• Insolvency — any live administration, liquidation, receivership or CVA. The single most useful field for supplier onboarding.

How this differs from Companies House itself

Companies House WebCheck is authoritative — it's the source. What it doesn't do is join the dots: it will tell you a director resigned; it won't tell you they resigned three days before the company entered liquidation and they were also director of another company that dissolved 90 days later. That's the pattern our director-check tool exists to catch. For quick lookups, gov.uk is fine. For patterns and stories, this is the right home.

When to graduate to a paid checker

If you're checking one company, you never need a paid subscription. If you're monitoring a portfolio, running KYC at scale, or need credit scores tied to trade limits, a free checker isn't the right tool. We rank the paid options honestly in Best paid UK company checker — and if you're just supplier-checking, our supplier credit-check guide is the shorter, cheaper route.

Common mistakes when doing a company check

• Trusting the trading name. Trading names are marketing; the legal name is what sits on Companies House. Always cross-reference the company number.
• Ignoring previous names. A recently renamed company can hide a bad history. The filing history shows every rename with a NM01.
• Missing the director story. A director's other appointments often tell you more than the target company itself — see Officer network explorer.
• Assuming filed accounts are recent. Small companies can file up to nine months after year-end. "Latest accounts to Dec 2024" filed today is normal — filed in 2027 isn't.

Where Sell Ltd fits in

Sell Ltd is a UK company research and business-sale platform. This checker is our free front door. If, six weeks from now, you decide the company you're checking is one you'd like to buy, we run the buyer workflow. If it's one you'd like to sell, we run the seller workflow — free listing, AI-generated IM, buyer outreach, NDA gating, structured negotiation. The research half is honestly free. The sale half is where our economics live.