How long Companies House registration really takes

The answer I used to give, and why it was useless

About a day. That was my answer for years and it is not wrong. Online registration costs 100 pounds and the certificate normally arrives inside 24 hours, which is genuinely fast for a public registry and faster than almost anything else the company will ever wait for.

It is also an answer to a question nobody asked.

The 24 hours covers the part where Companies House processes a complete, correct application. The time people actually experience is the time from deciding to form a company to holding a certificate, and most of that sits in front of the 24 hours in a queue nobody publishes a figure for.

So how long does Companies House registration take is really two questions, and I had been answering the easy one.

I still slightly resent how neat the 24 hour figure is, because it is accurate and it misleads everybody who reads it, including me for a good while.

An aside about the volume this runs at

Between April and June 2025 there were 209,798 incorporations in the UK. Across a quarter that is roughly 2,300 a day, every working day, arriving at 1 registry that also processed 185,336 dissolutions over the same 3 months.

I keep those 2,300 a day in mind whenever somebody expects a conversation about their application. There is no conversation to be had. It is a production line, and the way to move through a production line quickly is to arrive with the parts in the right shape rather than to explain yourself.

Which is the whole point of the rest of this. Anyway, back to the queue itself.

What stands in front of the 24 hours

Identity verification. It runs through GOV.UK One Login, every director needs their own personal code, and you verify once rather than per company.

Nothing published carries a timescale for it, and I have looked twice now. I am not going to invent a range. What is stated is that a biometric passport from any country is accepted, that an expired one is not accepted at all, and that a single email address can serve only 1 identity, so 2 directors sharing a company mailbox will be stopped before they start.

If the app cannot read your documents where you are, an Authorised Corporate Service Provider can verify you instead, which means an accountant, a solicitor or another professional supervised for anti money laundering purposes. That route exists precisely because the first one does not work everywhere.

My guess is that this is now the longest of the 4 steps for most people forming a company from outside the UK. That is 1 guess out of the several I could offer, and I am labelling it. Nobody publishes the data that would settle it.

I would like to give you a range in days for that 1 step and I cannot. Nothing published carries one, and a range I invented would be repeated back to me within a month by somebody who read it here.

How I would sequence it now

Verify identity first, for every director, before a single other thing is written down, because it is the one step in this whole sequence that carries no published timescale, cannot be accelerated by paying more, does not care that the rest of the application is ready, and has to be completed by each person individually rather than by whoever is organising the formation.

Check the name second, on the register.

That check is free and it takes a minute.

Do it against the same as rules rather than against your own sense of what sounds different, because those rules collapse punctuation, similar words and common company words together in a way that no founder's instinct reproduces and no amount of arguing afterwards undoes.

Sort the registered office third, before anything is filed. It has to be a physical UK address in the country of registration, and it has to satisfy the 2 delivery tests.

Only then would I send it.

I find it hard to explain why that order matters to somebody who has already read that the whole thing takes a day, and I keep thinking about how much of the frustration in this process comes from one accurate number sitting in front of three unmeasured ones. I still do not know a better way to say it, and nobody publishes the figures that would make the argument for me.

What I got wrong about the queue

For about 2 years I told people the slow part was Companies House. I had it exactly backwards, and my first attempt at explaining why was wrong too: I blamed the registry's workload when the registry publishes a 24 hour figure and holds to it across 209,798 incorporations a quarter.

The steps that take real time publish nothing at all. I went looking for a stated timescale on identity verification and found none, which took most of an afternoon and produced exactly one usable sentence, namely that there is nothing to find. A name that needs rethinking has no stated timescale either, because that one depends entirely on how attached you were to the first choice and how quickly you accept that the register disagrees with you.

I find that pattern hard to shake off now that I have seen it. The visible number attracts all the planning, and the invisible steps quietly own the calendar, which is true of company formation and is probably true of a great deal else.

So when somebody asks me how long this takes, I ask 2 questions back before answering. Has every director already verified their identity. Has the name been checked against the register. If either answer is no, the registry's own figure is not the number that matters, and quoting it just moves the disappointment later.

I do not know how many of the 209,798 got sent back on name grounds, because Companies House publishes no rejection rate at all. I have asked myself twice whether my own sample of a handful of formations means anything and the answer is that it does not.

My suspicion is that verification is the step that grew most in the last two years, and I would not defend that as more than a suspicion.

The name, which is where applications get sent back

A company name cannot be the same as another registered company's name. It must usually end in Limited or Ltd, and a company registered in Wales can use Cyfyngedig or Cyf instead.

The rules behind that 1 sentence are wider than they sound.

Same as does not mean identical. Punctuation, certain special characters, a word similar in appearance or meaning, and words used commonly in UK company names are all collapsed together, so two names that look nothing alike on a page can land on the same entry in the register and one of them will be refused.

GOV.UK gives its own example and it is worth reading slowly: "Hands UK Ltd and Hand's Ltd are the same as Hands Ltd".

Then there is too like, which is a different and slower problem. You can register a name, trade under it for 6 months, and still be told to change it if somebody complains and Companies House agrees.

The published example is "Easy Electrics For You Ltd is the same as EZ Electrix 4U Ltd", which tells you how far the comparison reaches.

The availability check is free and takes a minute on the register. I have had a formation bounce for a name that read as completely different to me and collapsed into an existing one under those rules, and I would now check before writing anything else down.

The documents, and the one you cannot change later

Two documents are needed at registration. A memorandum of association, which is the legal statement signed by the first shareholders to bring the company into being, and articles of association, which set out how it will be run. Only 1 of those 2 can ever be altered afterwards.

That date is the origin point for everything afterwards. The first confirmation statement falls due 12 months after it plus 14 days, the first accounts 21 months after registration, Corporation Tax 9 months and 1 day after the accounting period ends, and the return itself 12 months after the same period ends.

Articles of association work the other way round. You can use model articles, which are the standard default, or write your own and upload them when you register. Most companies use the model set and never think about it again.

You also need the share and shareholder details if the company is limited by shares, and the guarantor details if it is limited by guarantee.

Model articles are used by the overwhelming majority of the 209,798 companies formed in that quarter, and I have never once been asked to explain them.

These are the published Companies House fees, read on 4 September 2026, and they do not vary by who is filing.

What comes back, and what starts the moment it does

A certificate of incorporation. It confirms the company legally exists and carries 2 things that matter afterwards: the company number and the date of formation.

That date is the origin point for everything afterwards, and the calendar it starts is described in full in the piece on deadlines rather than repeated here.

You confirm your people with significant control during registration, using the usual test of more than 25 per cent of shares or voting rights, and you are normally set up for Corporation Tax at the same moment unless the company is dormant.

I have thought about how to make those 4 dates land with people who are still celebrating the certificate, and I have not found a way. The calendar starts on the day the celebrating happens.

The thing I still cannot measure

Three of the stages in this process have no published duration, and the one that does is the one everybody plans around, which is a strange way to build an expectation and it is how almost every article on this subject is written, including the ones I wrote.

I had it the wrong way round for 2 years.

I have gone back through my own notes twice looking for a pattern in how long verification takes and there is not one I would defend. My sample is small, the countries are different, and the only honest sentence is that I do not know.

What annoys me more than is reasonable is that the data exists somewhere. Somebody at the registry can see how many identity checks were started and finished last month, and how many applications came back on name grounds out of the 209,798 in that quarter. None of it is published, so the best I can do is tell you which steps to start early and admit that I cannot tell you how long they will run.