Identity verification is the biggest change to the Companies House register in years. Since 18 November 2025, directors and people with significant control (PSCs) have had to verify their identity, and the 12-month transition for existing appointments is now drawing to a close. If your software onboards business customers, checks suppliers or manages client companies, your users will expect it to show who has verified. This guide covers what the API can tell you, and where you need to be careful.
The rules in brief
New directors and PSCs must verify their identity, either through GOV.UK One Login or with an Authorised Corporate Service Provider (ACSP), and receive a Companies House personal code. Existing directors confirm they have verified when their company files its next confirmation statement during the transition year, and the confirmation statement cannot be filed without the personal codes of every director. PSCs have their own 14-day window to provide their code. Companies House describes 18 November 2025 as a start date rather than a single deadline: each person has their own due date. Check the current GOV.UK guidance for the details that apply to a specific company.
What the API now exposes
Companies House added an identity_verification_details block to its officer and PSC resources, including the corresponding streams. The fields include appointment_verification_start_on and appointment_verification_end_on, which relate to the verification statement for that appointment, and identity_verified_on. One detail is easy to misread: an end date marks when a verification statement was removed, for example after it was revoked. It is not an expiry date for the person’s identity verification.
Known gaps in the data
Developers on the Companies House forum have reported that the block is sometimes missing for people who appear as verified on the public register, and that some verified appointments have no identity_verified_on date. Until that settles, treat a missing block as unknown, not as unverified. Showing “not verified” for someone who has verified is the kind of error that damages trust in your product and can upset the people involved.
Design for three states, not two
A simple verified or not verified flag hides the uncertainty. A more honest model has at least three states: verification shown on the register, with the relevant date; no verification information returned; and a verification statement that has ended. Show the date of the underlying record and when your system last checked it, so a user can judge how current the answer is.
Signals, not compliance decisions
Whether a particular person is currently required to have verified depends on their role, when they were appointed and their company’s confirmation statement date. The API gives you useful signals, but it does not hand you a legal conclusion. Avoid labels such as “compliant” or “non-compliant”. Describe what the register shows, and leave the judgement to your user or their adviser. If your workflow does act on the result, for example by asking a customer for more information, record the data and the time it was checked.
Keep it current without wasting requests
Verification status changes far more often around confirmation statement dates and, for now, around the end of the transition year. Rather than re-checking every company on a fixed schedule, the officers and PSC streams let you react to changes as they happen. For on-demand checks, cache results for hours rather than days during this period, and remember the Companies House rate limit of 600 requests per five minutes.
How GovBridge handles it
GovBridge’s verify-and-enrich endpoint returns a company’s profile, active officers and PSCs in one call, each with the identity verification details Companies House provides, plus a summary of how many are shown as verified. We describe these as identity signals: GovBridge does not make an Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act compliance determination. It is in developer preview, with 500 free credits at www.govbridge.co.uk; the combined lookup costs three credits. For help designing a verification check into your own onboarding flow, email hello@yugsolutions.co.uk.