Every UK company director must now verify their identity with Companies House. We measured how many actually have — across the whole register.
As of 21 July 2026. Directors only (Companies House officers); PSCs not included.
Identity verification became a legal requirement on 18 November 2025. Existing directors must verify as part of their company's next confirmation statement, and the 12-month transition ends around 18 November 2026. A director who misses the deadline commits an offence, can be fined, and cannot make any Companies House filing or start a new company until it is resolved.
With under four months of the transition left, the scale of the backlog is the story: more than a third of all director appointments are still unverified, and hundreds of thousands are already overdue. For the accountants and formation agents who can carry out verification, that is a large book of urgent, billable work sitting in the public record.
The figures above cover every director. But some deadlines haven't arrived yet. If we look only at companies whose confirmation statement has already fallen due — the directors legally required to have verified by now — the non-compliance is much starker.
This is a direct count, not an estimate — every director of every company in the past-due cohort our sweep has reached so far.
Overdue rate by industry, among companies past their confirmation-statement date. Consumer-facing, owner-run trades — food, retail, care — lag the most.
| Sector | Overdue rate | Directors |
|---|
Overdue rate by nation, among companies past their confirmation-statement date. Northern Ireland and Scotland lag England and Wales.
| Nation | Overdue rate | Directors |
|---|
Regional figures compare companies within the past-due cohort. Because cohort membership is very slightly uneven across regions, treat these as relative comparisons within the cohort rather than national regional rates.
The headline national figures come from a uniform random sample of 4,812 active companies (7,596 director appointments) drawn from the Companies House bulk register. We read each director's identity-verification status from the Companies House public API. Confidence intervals are computed by cluster bootstrap with companies as the sampling unit, because directors within a company are not independent — a company either did its verification or it didn't.
We deliberately used a random sample rather than a convenience one. Verification status is strongly related to how recently a company was formed (new directors verify at appointment), and the register is dominated by recent incorporations, so any sample that isn't drawn at random will misstate the national rate.
Source data is the public Companies House register, used under the Open Government Licence. This is an independent analysis by B2B Data Scout and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Companies House. Journalists and researchers are welcome to cite these figures — get in touch for the underlying breakdowns or a comment.
Accountants and formation agents: paste your client list into our free checker and see exactly which directors are verified, approaching their deadline, or already overdue. Free for the first 25 directors.