UK Companies House Officers Search — Director Lookup

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Search the UK Companies House register for officers — directors, company secretaries, and LLP members — by company name, by company number, or by officer surname. Returns the officer's name, role, partial date of birth (month + year only — Companies House has suppressed the day component on the public register since 2018 under the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act), nationality, occupation, country of residence, date of appointment, date of resignation (where applicable), the company name and 8-character Companies House number they were appointed to, and the service address on file (corporate / mail-handling address — the residential address is permanently suppressed by CH on the public register).

The United Kingdom runs the most open, machine-readable corporate registry in the G7. Every limited company, LLP, public limited company, and overseas branch trading in the UK files its director list, company secretary, partial DOB, nationality, occupation, country of residence, and appointment / resignation dates with Companies House — and Companies House publishes those filings, in full, on a free public REST API at api.company-information.service.gov.uk. That openness is why the UK Companies House register is the foundational input for KYC / KYB / AML / EDD pipelines across every major UK challenger bank, every UK-licensed money-service business, and every Big Four / mid-tier auditor doing client-onboarding work. It is also the canonical input for cross-border investigative journalism (the OCCRP, the ICIJ Panama Papers / Pandora Papers consortium, Bellingcat, Private Eye, openDemocracy, and Companies House Open Data hackers all build on top of this same register).

This Actor wraps the official Companies House REST API with rate-limit-aware retry logic (Companies House enforces a 600 request / 5-minute rolling window per API key — this Actor handles HTTP 429 with exponential backoff so your KYC sweep does not blow up on a busy weekday morning) and pushes every officer record as a single dataset row, one row per officer, ready for downstream Snowflake / BigQuery / Postgres ingestion, ready for n8n / Make / Zapier workflow ingestion, ready for Claude / OpenAI / Cursor agent ingestion via Apify's MCP server. Set companyHouseApiKey to your free Companies House key for live access to the full UK register (5M+ active and dissolved entities) — or leave it blank and the Actor serves from a curated public-record universe of ~30 of the most-searched UK entities (FTSE 100 incumbents, UK fintech, plus dissolved entities relevant to KYC red-flag examples).

What you get per officer row

Each dataset row is a single Companies House officer record:

• name — the officer's name as registered with Companies House, in CH's canonical SURNAME, Forename(s) casing (e.g. MURPHY, Kenneth, STORONSKY, Nikolay)
• role — director, secretary, llp-member, llp-designated-member, corporate-director, judicial-factor, or one of the other ~15 enumerated CH officer roles
• date_of_birth_partial — YYYY-MM (Companies House suppresses the day component on the public register since 2018 under the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act, meaning every UK director's DOB on the public CH API is intentionally month + year only — this is the canonical KYC reality you need to design your matching logic around)
• nationality — the officer's stated nationality from the AP01 / AP02 appointment filing
• occupation — free-text occupation field as filed by the officer (Chief Executive Officer, Company Director, Solicitor, Accountant, etc.)
• country_of_residence — the officer's country of residence (NOT residential address — that is suppressed; only country granularity is exposed on the public register)
• appointed_on — ISO YYYY-MM-DD date the officer was appointed
• resigned_on — ISO YYYY-MM-DD date the officer resigned (null for current officers)
• company_name — the legal name of the company the officer is appointed to
• company_number — Companies House's 8-character canonical identifier (8 digits for England & Wales, SC + 6 digits for Scotland, NI + 6 digits for Northern Ireland)
• address — the officer's service address (corporate / mail-handling address) as filed at CH. Never the residential address — that is permanently redacted on the public register under the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act 2015
• data_source — Companies House REST API (live path) or Curated UK Companies House public-record disclosures (fallback path)

8 use cases — KYC, AML, M&A, lead-gen, journalism

1. KYC / KYB onboarding for UK-incorporated counterparties. Before onboarding any UK Ltd, PLC, or LLP counterparty, FCA Senior Manager Regime + the Money Laundering Regulations 2017 require verifying the legal entity, the directors, and the Persons of Significant Control (PSC) against the canonical Companies House register. This Actor automates the director-verification leg: pull the current officer list for the target company number, cross-reference the names + partial DOBs against the KYC documents the prospect uploaded, and flag any officer-list mismatch as a high-priority manual review. Pair this with Company Enrichment Tool for the full KYB package (domain, employee count, funding, tech stack).

2. AML EDD on UK shell-company red flags. UK Companies House is a known booking center for shell-company misuse — Private Eye, the OCCRP, openDemocracy, and the UK NCA have all documented systematic abuse of cheap (£12) UK incorporation by sanctions evaders, layering schemes, and trade-based money-laundering networks. The classic red flags this Actor surfaces directly: (a) directors who resign en masse 3-12 months before the company is struck off, (b) directors with nominee-service country of residence (e.g. a UK Ltd with directors all resident in BVI / Belize / Seychelles), (c) the same officer appearing across 50+ dormant Ltds with no operating history (set includeFormerOfficers=true + sweep across multiple companyNumber lookups). For the PSC + UBO leg, layer in the Companies House /company/{number}/persons-with-significant-control endpoint via b2b-leads-finder.

3. PSC register cross-reference for sanctions screening. Since 2016, every UK company must file a PSC (Person of Significant Control) register — the UK's beneficial-ownership transparency mechanism. The PSC register lives at the same Companies House endpoint as the officer register, so this Actor (officer leg) plus a downstream PSC pull gives you the full director + beneficial-owner picture for OFAC SDN / OFSI / EU consolidated / UN sanctions screening. Critical for FCA-regulated firms and any UK exporter under the Russia / Belarus / Iran / DPRK sanctions regimes.

4. M&A diligence — target board composition + director interlock mapping. Before LOI on a UK target, pull the target company's current officers, then sweep across every related subsidiary in the corporate group (using the parent's company_number plus the subsidiary numbers). Set includeFormerOfficers=true to capture the prior CEO / CFO / chairman who may still hold founder shares, may be a non-executive director on a related entity, or may be the prior litigant in a director-disqualification action. Pair with SEC Form 13F Holdings Tracker for the US institutional-ownership cross-reference and Singapore ACRA Companies for the SEA-jurisdiction leg.

5. Director-disqualification screening. The UK's Insolvency Service maintains a public Register of Disqualified Directors (under the Company Directors Disqualification Act 1986) — currently ~12,000 disqualified individuals. Disqualifications run typically 2-15 years, and during the disqualification window the individual cannot be a director or take part in promotion / formation / management of any UK company. Sweep this Actor's officer output against the disqualified-directors register, looking for partial name + partial DOB matches. Any match against an actively-disqualified director is an immediate company-level red flag — the company is illegally constituted and likely a candidate for striking-off.

6. B2B lead-gen — UK director outreach by sector. Every UK Ltd files an SIC code identifying its industry. Pull officers across the SIC code range you care about (e.g. SIC 62012 = "Business and domestic software development", SIC 64191 = "Banks") and you have the canonical UK decision-maker list for that sector: every CEO, CTO, CFO, and chairman, name + role + appointment date, no scraping, no LinkedIn TOS violation, no ZoomInfo enterprise contract. Cross-link with B2B Leads Finder for the email-enrichment + intent-data layer to convert the director list into a workable cold-outreach pipeline.

7. Investigative journalism — UK shell entity + cross-border layering. The OCCRP / ICIJ / Bellingcat / openDemocracy / Private Eye / FinCEN Files investigations all rely on Companies House as the primary discovery layer for UK-domiciled shell entities used in cross-border layering schemes. Set includeFormerOfficers=true, sweep across a known cluster of Ltds (e.g. Scottish Limited Partnerships, LLPs in known nominee-director networks), and the output gives you the full director-appointment timeline for the cluster, ready for graph analysis (Neo4j / Linkurious / Maltego) to surface the human nominees who connect the cluster. For the Greater China leg, layer in Hong Kong Companies Registry; for the India leg, India MCA Companies.

8. Recruiter / executive-search intelligence — UK director moves. Every CEO / CFO / chairman move in a UK Ltd shows up as a CH appointment / resignation filing within ~14 days — months ahead of the LinkedIn update, the press release, or the executive-search news. Set includeFormerOfficers=true, filter on senior-leadership occupations (Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chairman, Managing Director), and you have a near-real-time signal of UK senior-leadership moves across the entire UK economy — perfect for executive-search lead-gen, headhunter pipeline, or institutional-investor governance research.

How this Actor compares vs. enterprise alternatives

Bottom line: Veriff and Onfido are the right answer if you need a full identity-verification product — government-ID OCR + face-liveness + Sanctions screening + AML risk score, bundled per check. Bureau van Dijk Orbis and Refinitiv World-Check are the right answer if you have a multi-jurisdiction enterprise compliance program with an annual budget and a vendor-management process. Going direct to Companies House is the right answer if you have the engineering capacity to handle the 600 req / 5-min rate limit yourself, manage the API-key rotation, build the retry / backoff layer, and own the Snowflake / BigQuery ingestion ETL — many UK challenger banks and Big Four firms already do this. This Actor is the right answer if you want clean, structured UK Companies House officer data, in a pay-as-you-go model, with the rate-limit handling and Snowflake / BigQuery / MCP / n8n ingestion already done — at $0.05 per officer record instead of $2-9 per KYC check or $25k-$50k per Orbis / Refinitiv seat.

Input

• searchQuery — partial-match search across company names and officer surnames (e.g. tesco, wise, storonsky, dyson)
• companyNumber — exact 8-char Companies House identifier (00445790, SC090312, NI012345). Takes precedence over searchQuery when both are provided
• includeFormerOfficers — boolean, default false. When true, returns resigned officers in addition to current
• maxResults — hard cap on total officer rows returned (1-500, prefill 25)
• companyHouseApiKey — optional. Free key from https://developer.company-information.service.gov.uk/. Without it, the Actor serves from a curated fallback universe of ~30 of the most-searched UK entities

Pricing — pay per officer record

• apify-actor-start — minimal flat fee at run start (covers infrastructure & connection setup)
• apify-default-dataset-item — $0.05 per UK Companies House officer record pushed to the dataset

A typical 25-officer KYC sweep (covering one target company's full current board) costs ~$1.25. A 100-officer M&A diligence sweep across a 5-subsidiary group costs ~$5. A 1,000-officer sector-wide UK director-outreach pull for B2B lead-gen costs ~$50.

For context: Veriff's per-check KYC pricing typically lands in the $4-9 range per identity; Onfido in the $2-5 range per check; Bureau van Dijk Orbis seat-licenses run $25k-$50k per year per analyst. This Actor sits ~2-3 orders of magnitude below the enterprise alternatives on a per-record basis — and on a strict apples-to-apples basis (CH officer record only, not bundled with face-liveness + sanctions scoring + ID OCR), the gap is even wider. Where Veriff / Onfido charge by the identity check and bundle in a face-match + liveness + sanctions scoring step, this Actor charges by the underlying officer record — and it's up to you to layer in your own face-match / sanctions / PEP / disqualified-director screen downstream.

Companies House API rate limits — and how this Actor handles them

The official Companies House REST API enforces a 600 request / 5-minute rolling rate limit per API key. That sounds generous but is easy to blow through on a serious KYC / KYB sweep — every company lookup costs 2 requests (one /company/{number} plus one /company/{number}/officers), so 600 requests buys you ~300 company lookups every 5 minutes, or ~3,600 per hour per key.

This Actor handles the rate-limit gracefully:

1. HTTP 429 detection — every request inspects the response status. A 429 triggers automatic backoff
2. Retry-After header respect — when CH returns a 429 with a Retry-After value, this Actor sleeps for at least that many seconds before retrying
3. Exponential backoff fallback — if no Retry-After is set (or if it's zero), this Actor backs off with 1.5 ^ attempt seconds, capped at 5 retries per endpoint
4. Per-company throttling — by default, the live path pulls officers from at most 5 matched companies per run, with up to 50 officers per page. That keeps a single run comfortably under the 600 / 5-minute window

For sweeps larger than ~300 companies per 5 minutes, request a higher-tier CH API key (the developer.company-information.service.gov.uk console allows raising limits via support ticket) or shard the sweep across multiple keys.

Data quality & sourcing notes — Companies House public-record discipline

All data returned is sourced from public Companies House filings under the Companies Act 2006 and the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act 2015 (which introduced the public-record DOB-day suppression in 2018). Director names, partial DOBs (month + year only), nationality, occupation, country of residence, and service addresses are all matters of public record — every UK director's appointment filing (AP01 / AP02) is statutorily required to disclose those fields, and Companies House publishes them on the free REST API.

What this Actor does NOT expose:

• Residential addresses — permanently redacted on the public CH register since the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act dispute-resolution process. The only address surfaced is the officer's service address (corporate / mail-handling)
• Full DOB day — also suppressed since 2018; only month + year are exposed
• National Insurance number — never published on the CH register (this is a UK HMRC-only identifier)
• Personal email / phone — never published on the CH register

The Actor's curated fallback universe (used when no API key is supplied) is composed entirely of officer disclosures already public via the same Companies House REST register, plus HKEX-style cross-references in the parent company's IPO Prospectus / Annual Report. No scraping of paid or rate-limited endpoints; no captcha bypass; no scraping of LinkedIn or other social media. Users are responsible for complying with UK GDPR + the Data Protection Act 2018 when handling director names + DOBs in downstream pipelines.

Related NexGenData Actors

If this UK Companies House officer Actor is useful, the following sister Actors complete a global corporate-registry + KYC / KYB / M&A diligence stack:

• 🇭🇰 Hong Kong Companies Registry — CR Number & Director Lookup — sister Actor for HK's ICRIS register; identical schema shape (CH number ↔ CR number)
• 🇸🇬 Singapore ACRA Companies — sister Actor for Singapore's ACRA register (UEN ↔ CH number)
• 🇮🇳 India MCA Companies — sister Actor for India's Ministry of Corporate Affairs register (CIN ↔ CH number)
• 💼 B2B Leads Finder — convert the UK director list into a workable outreach pipeline with email enrichment + intent signals
• 🏢 Company Enrichment Tool — domain, employee count, funding, tech stack — the full KYB enrichment layer to pair with this Actor's officer leg

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Legal & compliance

Companies House officer data is matters of public record under the Companies Act 2006 (sections 162-167 covering the duty to keep a register of directors) and the Companies Act 2006 (section 1136 covering location and inspection of the public register). Every UK company is statutorily required to publish its directors' names, partial DOBs, nationality, occupation, country of residence, service addresses, and appointment dates on the public Companies House register — and CH publishes those filings, in full, on its free REST API. This Actor does not scrape any paid or rate-limited endpoint, does not bypass any access control, and does not surface residential addresses or any other suppressed personal data.

Users are responsible for ensuring downstream processing of officer data complies with the UK GDPR, the Data Protection Act 2018, the Money Laundering Regulations 2017 (MLR 2017), the FCA Senior Manager Regime (where applicable), and any sector-specific obligations (e.g. solicitor-regulated firms under the SRA Accounts Rules, accountants under the ICAEW / ACCA AML supervisory regime, estate agents under HMRC AML supervision). For sanctions screening, layer in the OFSI consolidated list, OFAC SDN, EU consolidated, and UN consolidated; this Actor surfaces the officer + service-address fields needed to feed those screening engines but does not perform the screening itself.

This Actor is provided "as-is" under the standard Apify terms — Apify SLA covers infrastructure availability; data accuracy is a direct function of what officers + companies file with Companies House. When CH itself has stale, missing, or contested filings (e.g. a striking-off pending an appeal), this Actor surfaces the CH state-of-record as-is and does not attempt to reconcile against third-party sources. For higher-assurance use cases (e.g. regulated FCA Senior Manager Regime onboarding), users should combine this Actor's CH-officer output with corroborating evidence (government ID OCR via Veriff / Onfido, sanctions screening via Refinitiv World-Check / Dow Jones RiskCenter, PEP screening via LexisNexis WorldCompliance).