The Companies House Fee Schedule at Two Years: What the May 2024 Restructure Costs UK Businesses — and What ECCTA Funds Next

The End of the Eight-Year Freeze

Between April 2016 and April 2024, Companies House kept its core filing fees broadly static. Digital incorporation cost £12. The confirmation statement sat at £13. A voluntary strike-off ran £8. For the best part of a decade, the registrar charged prices that had last been set when David Cameron was still in Downing Street.

That ended on 1 May 2024, when the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 (ECCTA) handed Companies House a cost-recovery funding model under section 87 of the Act. For the first time, the registrar was required to set fees that recovered the full cost of its services — not just processing the filing, but the investigative, enforcement and identity-verification infrastructure the Act also mandates.

The result was the most substantial fee restructure in Companies House history. Two years on, here is what changed, what it costs now, and why the regime is still evolving.

The Core Fee Schedule: What Every UK Company Pays

Incorporation

Digital incorporation saw the steepest proportional rise — a quadrupling from £12 to £50 — because the old fee had drifted furthest from actual processing cost. The same-day digital rate, set at £78 in 2016, was left unchanged because it already approximated cost recovery. The paper differential widened: paper incorporation now costs 42% more than digital, an explicit nudge towards electronic filing ahead of the WebFiling phase-out.

Annual Maintenance

The confirmation statement — the single most-filed document on the register after accounts — more than doubled in price for digital filers. Paper filers saw a smaller proportional rise, but the absolute gap between digital and paper confirmation statements remains substantial at £28. Accounts filing stays free regardless of medium, though ECCTA's move towards software-only filing for accounts (mandating iXBRL-tagged submissions) means "free digital" will increasingly mean "free via approved software," not free via the legacy WebFiling portal.

Structural and Event-Driven Filings

Several event-driven filings surged by more than 300%. The DS01 strike-off application — long the cheapest route off the register — saw the steepest relative increase of any common filing. At £33, it now costs nearly as much as the confirmation statement, a parity that did not exist before the restructure.

Charge and Mortgage Registration

Charge registration fees were left untouched — one of the few categories to escape the restructure. The rationale, set out in the Government's consultation response, was that secured-lending filings already operated near cost-recovery and that raising them risked disincentivising registration, undermining the very transparency the Act seeks to enhance.

What Remains Free

A substantial number of filings still carry no direct charge:

• Annual accounts — both full and small-company (filleted or otherwise), digital or paper
• Director, secretary and PSC appointments and terminations (AP01, AP02, AP03, AP04, TM01, TM02, PSC01–PSC09)
• Registered office address changes (AD01)
• SAIL address changes (AD02)
• Share capital and allotment returns (SH01, SH02)
• Single Alternative Inspection Location changes (AD03, AD04)
• People with Significant Control notifications

The policy logic is straightforward: these are either legally mandated updates with no discretion (director changes, PSC notifications) or core register-integrity filings where imposing a fee would create a perverse incentive not to file. Companies House's cost-recovery model cross-subsidises these from incorporation and annual-maintenance revenue.

The Cost-Recovery Arithmetic

Before ECCTA, Companies House operated as a trading fund within the Department for Business and Trade, retaining its fee income to cover operating costs. The pre-2024 fee schedule generated roughly £70–80 million annually — enough to run the register as a passive repository, but nowhere near enough to fund the active policing, identity verification, and enforcement powers ECCTA introduced.

The May 2024 restructure was designed to close that gap. The Government's impact assessment projected that the new fee schedule would raise approximately £150–170 million per year once fully phased in, roughly doubling the registrar's revenue base. The additional income is notionally allocated across three new cost centres:

1. Identity verification infrastructure — building and operating the authorised corporate service provider (ACSP) gateway, the digital ID checks, and the document-authentication systems required by ECCTA Part 1.
2. Intelligence and enforcement — the registrar's new powers to query filings, reject suspicious submissions, and share data with law enforcement under Part 3 of the Act.
3. The register-of-registers integration — linking Companies House data with the PSC register, the Register of Overseas Entities, and HMRC's Trust Registration Service.

Digital vs Paper: The Widening Gap

One of the clearest signals in the new schedule is the growing digital-paper differential. Before May 2024, the premium for filing on paper was modest: £28 extra for incorporation, £27 for a confirmation statement. After the restructure:

• Incorporation: £21 digital premium has become a £21 gap (paper still costs £21 more), but the ratio has narrowed from 3.3× to 1.4×
• Confirmation statement: paper costs £28 more than digital (83% premium), compared to £27 (208% premium) before
• DS01 strike-off: paper costs £11 more (33% premium), compared to £2 (25% premium) before

The restructure deliberately constrained the absolute digital-paper gap while raising both. Companies House wants filers on digital channels ahead of the WebFiling portal's eventual retirement, but it also needs paper pricing to remain accessible for the minority of filers — predominantly older sole directors and very small family companies — who cannot or will not use software.

WebFiling and the Looming Sunset

ECCTA section 88 empowers the registrar to mandate software-only filing for specified document types. The direction of travel is unambiguous: the legacy WebFiling portal, launched in 2001 and still used by hundreds of thousands of small companies, will be phased out for accounts filing. Confirmation statements and incorporation are likely to follow.

The fee schedule supports this transition. The £50 digital incorporation fee applies whether you use WebFiling, a formation agent's software, or a direct API integration. But as software-only mandates roll out, the distinction between "WebFiling" and "software filing" will collapse — and with it, the last free-text entry point into the Companies House system. For the micro-entity that currently types its balance sheet into a WebFiling form and submits it for free, the future is a paid software product with iXBRL tagging, or an accountant.

Cross-Border Comparison: Where UK Incorporation Costs Sit

Context matters. The UK's £50 digital incorporation fee sits in the middle of comparable jurisdictions:

The UK remains cheaper than Australia, Singapore and US (Delaware) for setup and annual maintenance combined, but it is no longer at the bargain-basement end it occupied when incorporation cost £12. New Zealand, at roughly £5.50 for incorporation and £11.20 for the annual return, remains the cheapest common-law jurisdiction by a wide margin.

Information Services: Search and Bulk Data

Companies House also charges for data access products, a revenue stream that sits alongside filing fees:

The register itself — company profiles, filing histories, accounts downloads — is free to the public via the Companies House beta service. This was a deliberate policy choice embedded in the original Companies House digital strategy and largely preserved through the ECCTA restructure. The cost of open-access data is cross-subsidised by filing fees, and Companies House has resisted introducing a paywall for basic company information on the grounds that open access is itself a transparency tool.

Where the Fee Revenue Actually Goes

Companies House published its first post-restructure annual report and accounts in mid-2025. The revenue breakdown for the 2024–25 financial year showed:

• £148 million total fee income (up from £82 million in 2023–24)
• £42 million allocated to IT infrastructure, including the new identity-verification platform
• £23 million on intelligence and enforcement — a new cost category that did not exist before ECCTA
• £18 million on operational delivery of core registry functions
• £12 million capital investment in the register-of-registers data-linking programme

The surplus after operating expenditure is retained within the trading fund and carried forward against future capital projects, including the full replacement of the Companies House core database (projected for 2027–29).

What the Fee Schedule Tells Us About Companies House's Future

Three signals from the May 2024 restructure deserve attention:

1. Enforcement has a price tag. The pre-ECCTA registrar was a passive repository. The post-ECCTA registrar is an active gatekeeper with powers to query, reject, and strike off filings, to verify identity, and to share intelligence with law enforcement. That infrastructure is not cheap, and the fee schedule is the funding mechanism.

2. The paper channel is being priced out of existence — slowly. Paper filing still exists for every major service, but the differential is growing and the software-only mandate for accounts is the thin end of a wedge that will eventually encompass incorporation and the confirmation statement. The fee schedule reflects the registrar's long-term bet that 95%+ of filings will be digital by 2030.

3. The next restructure is already in view. The May 2024 fees were set on cost-recovery projections made in 2023. Two years of actual operating data will inform the next review, expected in 2027. The direction of the next adjustment — up or down — depends on whether the identity-verification programme comes in under or over budget. Early indications from the 2024–25 annual report suggest IT costs are running ahead of projection, which points to upward pressure next time.

For the UK's 5.5 million companies, the practical implications are straightforward: incorporation and annual maintenance now cost meaningfully more than they did three years ago, the free-accounts-filing window is likely to shrink as WebFiling is retired, and the registrar is no longer a passive record-keeper. The fee schedule is the price of that transformation.