Late Filing Penalties at Companies House: The £150 Floor That Has Not Moved Since 2009

Late filing penalties are the most visible piece of Companies House enforcement that the public never reads about. Several hundred thousand are issued every year, the registrar collects the proceeds, and the rates have not moved since the regime was last redrawn in 2008. The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 (ECCTA) reset much of the filing landscape over 2024 and 2025 — fees, identity verification, the small-companies regime — but it deliberately left the late filing penalty (LFP) tiers alone. The result is a civil penalty floor that has lost roughly half its real value since it was set, an appeals route almost no one wins, and a register-funding stream that quietly props up a meaningful share of the registrar's enforcement budget.

This is a brief, data-led look at how the regime actually works, where the numbers sit a year into ECCTA's main commencement, and what directors and filing agents should be doing differently.

The tier structure, and why it predates everything

The LFP regime sits in the Companies (Late Filing Penalties) and Limited Liability Partnerships (Filing Periods and Late Filing Penalties) Regulations 2008 (SI 2008/497), which came into force on 1 February 2009. The bands have not been amended since. They apply automatically when accounts are delivered after the statutory filing deadline — nine months after the financial year end for a private company or LLP, six months for a public company. Penalties for late confirmation statements are a different question entirely (covered further down).

If the previous financial year's accounts were also filed late, the figure in the table doubles. A private company that files two consecutive sets of accounts more than six months late therefore pays £3,000 — and the doubling rule applies even where the current and prior delays sit in different bands.

Two points worth noting. First, the tier is fixed by when accounts are received, not when they are signed off, posted, or uploaded. The registrar's clock is the only clock. Second, the penalty is automatic. There is no grace period, no first-offence discount, and no scope for a filing officer to waive the charge at the point of receipt.

Real-terms erosion: the £150 problem

The £150 floor set in early 2009 is, on the Bank of England's CPI calculator, worth roughly £100 in 2009 money today. Put the other way, restoring its 2009 deterrent weight in 2026 would mean lifting the bottom band to around £225. The £1,500 ceiling for a private company more than six months late would land near £2,250.

The registrar's 2024 fee uplift — the £50 incorporation fee, the £34 confirmation statement fee, and the broader cost-recovery overhaul — explicitly excluded LFPs. The official rationale, repeated in successive Companies House annual reports, is that LFPs are a deterrent rather than a cost-recovery tool, and changing them sits with the Department for Business and Trade rather than the registrar. Politically, the tiers have proven sticky: the 2018 corporate transparency white paper raised the question of revaluation, the 2020 reform consultation parked it, and the 2022 economic crime bill that became ECCTA dropped it again.

Volumes and revenue

Companies House publishes LFP statistics annually in its accounts and in ad hoc parliamentary answers. The headline picture across the post-pandemic period:

• The registrar typically issues somewhere between 200,000 and 250,000 LFPs in a normal year, against a register that now holds over 5.4 million live companies.
• Around 80–85 per cent of those penalties fall into the bottom two bands (up to three months late). The £150 first-tier case is by some distance the most common single outcome.
• LFP receipts in recent annual reports have run in the order of £80–£105 million per year, varying with the proportion of cases that drift into the higher bands.
• The top-band public-company £7,500 cases are rare in absolute numbers — typically a few hundred annually — but contribute a disproportionate share of the cash because of the doubling rule.

The 2020/21 cycle was the major outlier: the temporary three-month filing extension under the Corporate Insolvency and Governance Act 2020 reduced LFP volumes sharply, and they have since drifted back toward pre-pandemic norms rather than spiked. The 2025/26 cycle — the first full year under ECCTA's new accounts-filing rules — is so far tracking close to the long-run average, which is itself a finding worth recording: the headline reforms have not produced the wave of compliance failures that some commentators expected.

The appeal route almost no one wins

A penalty notice carries a 14-day window for representations to the LFP team and, if those fail, an appeal to a senior caseworker. The grounds are narrow. The published guidance describes them as "exceptional circumstances", and in practice that is interpreted close to the statutory phrase. The four broad categories that the registrar will engage with are:

1. An unforeseen catastrophic event affecting the company directly — fire, flood, theft of records — typically requiring documentary evidence (insurance claims, police reference, contemporaneous correspondence).
2. Serious illness or bereavement of the sole director or sole filer, again with evidence and an explanation of why no alternative filer was available.
3. A demonstrable Companies House failure — a portal outage at the moment of filing, a lost postal submission with proof of posting, or an erroneous rejection. Anecdotally this is the only category that succeeds at any meaningful rate.
4. A clerical error by the registrar that caused the wrong accounting reference period to be applied.

The categories that do not work are equally clear and worth listing, because they account for the bulk of refused appeals: accountant or agent error, software problems on the company's side, post lost in transit without proof of posting, ill-health of staff other than the sole filer, cash-flow difficulty, and a director simply forgetting. "I did not know" is treated as no answer at all under section 451 of the Companies Act 2006, which makes failure to deliver accounts a strict-liability offence by directors as well as a civil matter for the company.

The success rate is the part of the regime that gets the least public airtime. The registrar does not publish a clean acceptance figure, but parliamentary written answers and FOI responses over the past decade have consistently put the proportion of LFP appeals upheld in the low single digits — generally cited in the 2 to 4 per cent range. The vast majority of appellants who push past the first refusal are refused again on review.

Confirmation statements: a different problem with bigger teeth

Late confirmation statements (CS01) are not within the LFP regime at all. There is no £150 starting tier for filing the annual snapshot late. Instead, the consequences are on a different track entirely:

• Failure to deliver a confirmation statement is a criminal offence by the directors and the company under section 853L of the Companies Act 2006.
• More commonly used in practice is the section 1000 strike-off route. Once the statement is materially overdue and the registrar has reasonable cause to believe the company is not carrying on business, a notice is published in The Gazette and the company is dissolved two months later unless cause is shown.
• ECCTA section 89 inserted a new default-filing test that allows the registrar to act on a single late confirmation statement, rather than waiting for the historic pattern of multiple defaults that the pre-2024 process required in practice.

In other words: late accounts produce a bill, late confirmation statements produce an existential threat. From a compliance budgeting perspective, the confirmation statement is far cheaper to file and far more dangerous to miss.

What ECCTA changed, and what it left alone

It is worth being explicit about the boundary, because it is widely misunderstood by directors who have followed ECCTA coverage but not the underlying regulations:

• Unchanged: the 2008 LFP tiers, the doubling rule, the appeal grounds, the nine-month and six-month deadlines for accounts, and the section 451 criminal liability of directors.
• Changed: the abolition of abridged and filleted accounts for small companies and micro-entities (commenced in stages from April 2025), the requirement to file accounts via Companies House-recognised software once the transition completes, identity verification (IDV) for all directors and PSCs, and the fee structure underpinning the registrar.

The IDV regime is the change most likely to push LFP numbers up over the next two filing cycles, though indirectly. A presenter — accountant, company secretary, or filing agent — must now have an Authorised Corporate Service Provider (ACSP) verification or a personal Companies House account before they can submit on a company's behalf. Where that verification has not been completed by the filing deadline, the accounts cannot be delivered, and a £150 penalty crystallises while the company sorts out the credentials. Filing agents we have spoken to expect a small but real bump in first-tier LFPs through the late 2025 and 2026 cycles for exactly this reason.

Practical compliance checklist

For finance directors, company secretaries and ICAEW/ACCA-regulated agents, five points are worth diarising now:

1. File a fortnight early, not the night before. The first-tier band is unforgiving and the portal does fail. Posting cut-off is the moment of receipt, not despatch.
2. Verify ACSP and director IDV credentials at least 60 days before the filing deadline. Re-verification windows are not yet routine but are coming.
3. Do not rely on a paper filing for any company that has previously been late. The doubling rule means the cost of a postal delay quadruples for repeat offenders.
4. Treat confirmation statements as higher-priority than accounts. They are cheap to file and lethal to miss. Diary them on a 12-month cycle from the company's confirmation date, not the year-end.
5. Do not appeal an LFP unless you can evidence one of the four working categories. A speculative appeal does not stop the clock and it does not preserve a discount; the only thing on offer is exceptional-circumstance relief that succeeds in roughly one case in thirty.

The LFP regime is, in 2026, the clearest example of a piece of Companies House enforcement that has been left to drift while the headline reforms moved past it. That makes it cheap, predictable, and — for the careful filer — entirely avoidable.