What is a confirmation statement, and does my dormant company need one?

A confirmation statement is not a tax return and it does not report profit. It's a once-a-year check that the details Companies House holds about your company — its registered office, directors, people with significant control, shareholders and what it does — are still correct. If nothing has changed, you're confirming that; if something has changed, this is where you tell Companies House.

Every company on the Companies House list has to file one, at least once every 12 months, and being dormant makes no difference. A dormant company still has directors and a registered office, and Companies House still needs to know they're correct.

The 12-month period is called the review period. It starts on the date your company was incorporated, or the date of your last confirmation statement, and you have 14 days after it ends to file. That 14-day window is separate from — and usually much tighter than — the nine months you get to file annual accounts, which is why it's easy to file accounts on time and still miss this one.

Companies House charges a fee to file, once per 12-month review period no matter how many statements you file within it. Some changes — a new director, a different registered office — go through their own separate filings rather than through the statement itself. Our price for handling the whole thing, including the Companies House fee, is on our pricing page — and it's a placeholder we haven't finalised yet.

Missing the deadline doesn't just mean a late filing. Companies House can start the process to strike your company off the list entirely, and it's a criminal offence for directors to let it happen. Nothing about that is automatic on day one, but there's no grace period built into the law, so the safest approach is to treat the 14 days as a hard deadline rather than a soft one.

If you'd rather not track the date yourself, that's the whole point of this service: tell us your company number, we'll tell you when yours is due, prepare the statement, and file it once you've confirmed it's correct.