How to check if a UK company is legit — the 10-step guide

Why 'is this company legit?' is the wrong question

Fraud rarely comes from a fake company. It comes from a real company that has been incorporated cheaply, used briefly, and abandoned. The Companies House register is a filing cabinet, not a validation service — it will happily list a shell company with a service-office address and one nominee director, and it will list Sell Ltd. Existence is the floor, not the ceiling. The right question is: is this company real, active, trading, and honest about who owns it?

Step 1 — Confirm the exact entity

Ask for the eight-digit company number, not just the trading name. Trading names are unregulated — I can write "Barclays Financial Services" on an invoice tomorrow from a company called Widget Holdings 12345 Limited and no law is broken. Only the company number is a unique identifier. Search it on find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk and confirm the returned company name matches the invoice to the character.

Step 2 — Read the status line, not just the badge

Companies House uses eight statuses. Only two are safe to transact with: Active and Active (proposed strike-off suspended). If you see any of the following, stop:

• Proposed to be struck off — the register is trying to dissolve them.
• Liquidation — assets are being sold to pay creditors.
• In administration — an insolvency practitioner is in control.
• Dissolved — the company no longer exists in law.

Step 3 — Check filing hygiene

Any real trading company files two things every year: accounts (AA) and a confirmation statement (CS01). Miss either for six months and Companies House starts strike-off. If you're on a company's page and the filing history shows the last accounts more than 15 months ago, or the last CS01 more than 13 months ago, the company is either dormant, in trouble, or being wound down. Our confirmation statement checker and accounts explorer surface both dates instantly.

Step 4 — Read the accounts (even if you don't do accounting)

You do not need to understand FRS 102 to spot a shell. Open the most recent set of accounts. Skim for three lines: turnover, average number of employees, and creditors falling due within one year. A trading business has all three. A micro-entity with zero turnover, one employee (the director), and £2 of share capital is a holding structure or a shell. If they're invoicing you from it, ask why.

Full walkthrough with screenshots on our how to read Companies House filings guide, and if the invoice is coming from a dormant company, our dormant company meaning explainer is the fastest way to understand why that's a red flag.

Step 5 — Look at who's actually running it

Open the officers tab. Directors leave a paper trail — click into each name. Legitimate long-standing directors have multiple appointments over years, plausible dates of birth, and residential addresses that don't match the corporate service pool. Suspicion signals:

• Single-appointment director who took office in the last 90 days.
• Common name (John Smith, Michael Brown) with a birth month/year identical to dozens of other directors.
• Residential address that resolves to a formation-agent business centre.
• Nominee resignation the day a big invoice is issued.

Our free director check pulls all appointments and cross-references phoenix patterns.

Step 6 — Find the beneficial owner (PSC)

Since 2016 every UK company must file who ultimately owns 25% or more — the Person with Significant Control. If the PSC panel says "the company has not yet completed taking reasonable steps to identify PSCs" on a trading business that's been incorporated for over a year, treat that as a red flag on its own. It's the single most common shell-company tell. See how to check company ownership for the full walkthrough and the PSC lookup tool to run it now.

Step 7 — Inspect the registered office

Type the postcode into Google Maps. If the pin is a mailbox place, a formation agent, or the corner of a business centre with two hundred other tenants, that isn't the trading address. That's fine on its own — many legitimate businesses use a service address to keep home addresses off the register — but you should be able to obtain a real trading address in writing before you send funds. If they can't produce one, you have your answer. Detail on the difference in our registered office vs trading address guide.

Step 8 — Check for charges and factoring

The 'charges' tab on Companies House lists secured lending against the company. One or two charges from mainstream lenders is completely normal. What isn't normal:

• Three or more charges from short-term lenders in the last 12 months (cash-flow crisis).
• Invoice-finance factoring — technically you may be dealing with the factor, not the company. Read the small print.
• Personal guarantees from a director dated recently — they know the business is fragile.

Step 9 — Search the London Gazette

Every UK insolvency, strike-off, and creditor meeting is legally published in the London Gazette. Search the exact company name at thegazette.co.uk. If you find a meeting of creditors, a notice of intention to appoint administrators, or a Members' Voluntary Liquidation, act on it. Directors sometimes keep trading through these — that's when suppliers get left as unsecured creditors. If the company is in administration, our live administrations feed will show it too.

Step 10 — VAT and payroll: HMRC cross-checks

Real trading over £90,000 a year must be VAT-registered. Use HMRC's free Check a UK VAT number service; a valid response confirms the number is real and returns the registered name and postcode. Cross-check the returned name against the Companies House name. Payroll is harder to verify externally, but a claimed 20-employee business filing micro-entity accounts with one employee is inconsistent — that's your prompt to ask more questions. Our VAT registration check walkthrough covers it end-to-end.

What the checks look like in practice

Most legitimate companies clear this list in under fifteen minutes. Most fraudulent setups fail two or three checks. The pattern isn't "fake company" — it's real company, wrong story. A trading business claiming decade-long operations from a two-month-old entity. A supplier invoicing from a dormant company. A director whose real appointment history is on a different (dissolved) company. When the story on the sales call doesn't match the story on the register, believe the register.

Where the paid tools help, and where they don't

Paid checkers — Endole, CompanyCheck, DueDil, Red Flag Alert, Creditsafe — repackage the same Companies House and HMRC data with an aggregated credit score and monitoring alerts. For monthly volume KYC across hundreds of suppliers, the alert layer is worth paying for. For a one-off check, the free public sources answer the question. If you're weighing them up, compare on our Companies House vs paid checkers post, or the ranked list at best free UK company checker.

What Sell Ltd adds on top

Sell Ltd is the only free UK checker built specifically for people buying, growing or selling a limited company — not a KYC compliance layer. Alongside the ten checks above we run a transparent 0–100 credit score, plot director networks so you can see phoenix activity fast, and (for members) run a live "is this business really for sale" intelligence workflow. Everything you'd manually piece together, in one page. Start with the free UK company checker hub.

Related reading

• Spotting a shell company — 12 red flags
• How to check a UK company is trading (not just registered)
• How to check company ownership — PSC and beyond
• How to read Companies House filings
• Company checker FAQ — 30 answered questions
• Companies House terminology A–Z