Your deadline is not 17 November. It is whatever date your confirmation statement is due

Verifying your identity for Companies House is free and takes about fifteen minutes. Skipping it can end with your company bank account frozen, which is the only reason it is worth your attention today. The trap is the date. Almost every article points at 17 November 2026, the end of the twelve month transition. Your actual deadline is your own confirmation statement date, and for most companies that falls earlier. Companies House will not accept the statement until every director has verified, so one slow co-director stops the whole filing.

Find your real deadline in ninety seconds

Identity verification became a legal requirement on 18 November 2025, under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023. Everyone already on the register got a twelve month transition, which is where the 17 November 2026 date in the headlines comes from.

That date is the outer edge. It is not your deadline. Companies House states the rule for directors in one line: you provide your Companies House personal code "as part of your company's next confirmation statement".

So your deadline is your own confirmation statement date. Search your company on the free Companies House register and read the next statement date on the overview page. If it says October, your deadline is October. You then have 14 days after the review period ends to file.

If you are a director of three companies, the identity check itself is a one off, but the code has to appear in each company's statement.

The filing bounces, and that is the real risk

Put enforcement aside for a moment. What catches ordinary owners is mechanical, and Companies House says it plainly in the confirmation statement guidance: "We will not accept your company's confirmation statement until all directors have verified their identity."

Read that as a co-director problem. If you run the business with your partner, or there is a shareholder who was made a director at incorporation in 2013 and has not been near the place since, your filing waits on the slowest person on the record. You can be verified, early and organised, and still miss the date because someone else did not open the email.

Missing it is not a new offence with a new penalty. It is the old one: "You can be fined up to £5,000 and your company may be struck off if you do not file your confirmation statement."

Two roles, two separate clocks

Most owner-operators are both a director and a person with significant control. That is two obligations, not one, and the same personal code has to be supplied twice in two different places.

• As a director: in the company's confirmation statement.
• As a PSC of the same company: within a 14 day window starting the day after the company's confirmation statement date, using the Provide identity verification details for a PSC service. Filing the statement early does not move that window.
• As a PSC who is not a director, which is the classic shareholder spouse or parent: within the first 14 days of your birth month. Born on 22 January, your window is 1 to 14 January.

The PSC clock is where quiet non-compliance builds up. Your accountant chases confirmation statements. Nobody chases a birth month.

Half the register still has not moved

Companies House publishes its own progress figures. At 30 June 2026:

• 55.33% of director appointments were verified, 4,710,086 of them
• 41.86% of individual PSC appointments
• 49.68% of all appointments in scope

Those count appointments rather than people, and Companies House labels them unaudited management information, so treat them as direction rather than gospel. The direction is clear enough. With under five months of the transition left, roughly half the register still had to act, against a Companies House estimate of "6 to 7 million individuals" needing to verify by mid November 2026.

The practical consequence is queues. Your accountant reaches November with a stack of confirmation statements and a few clients who still cannot produce a code.

Free to do. Expensive to skip.

Verification costs nothing. You do it online through GOV.UK One Login, or in person at a Post Office branch that offers it, where the guidance says: "This service is free." An accountant or formation agent registered as an authorised agent can verify you instead, and may charge for that service.

Now the other column.

Companies House says it is "unlawful for a director to act as a director without completing identity verification", and that "if an individual director or equivalent breaches identity verification requirements, the whole company is also breaching requirements". It has three enforcement routes: prosecution through court, referral to the Insolvency Service, and financial penalties. Its published penalty scale runs from £250 for a minor first offence to £2,000 for a very serious fourth. It can also annotate the register "for public transparency", and disqualify directors.

Be honest about the odds: a two person salon is not top of anyone's prosecution list. That is exactly why owners shrug at this. The damage does not arrive as a court date. It arrives as a statement that will not submit, then an overdue filing, then a company proposed for strike off.

And this is the line worth remembering, from the government's own guidance on what follows a strike off: "You'll lose access to company bank accounts. You will not be able to send or receive money."

Think about that for a trading business. Card takings settle into an account nobody can reach. The rent goes unpaid because the direct debit fails. Payroll fails. Undoing it means administrative restoration, £341 in Companies House fees before anyone's time is counted, and it is not a same day fix.

That is the trade. Fifteen minutes and nothing, against a fortnight of that.

What it looks like from the outside

The register is public, free to search, and permanent. It is the first thing anyone checks about your business.

When a buyer's solicitor starts due diligence they do not open your accounts first. They open your Companies House record, because it takes ten seconds and costs nothing. So does a lender pricing a facility, a landlord assessing a lease assignment, and a corporate client running a supplier check.

An overdue confirmation statement, an annotation or a strike off notice is not just untidy. It says something specific about the business: that the basic obligations here depend on one distracted person remembering. That is the exact worry that turns into a lower offer, a bigger retention, or a longer earnout. It is the same instinct covered in why most small businesses never sell, and it is cheap to remove.

If you want the wider list of what should be current before anyone looks, start with the compliance checklist.