Appointing a new director: the AP01 playbook every UK founder should know in 2026

Appointing your first new director is one of those quietly emotional moments in a founder's journey. Maybe it's the co-founder you've been working alongside for a year who's finally ready to go on the register. Maybe it's the COO you just hired to take operations off your plate. Maybe it's a non-executive who's agreed to lend some credibility to your next funding round. Either way, the conversation is the fun bit. The paperwork is where a lot of founders trip up.

And since 18 November 2025, when Companies House switched on mandatory identity verification under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act (ECCTA), the paperwork has teeth it didn't have before. You can no longer just file an AP01 and have a new director live on the register by lunchtime — not unless the person has already verified their identity with Companies House or through an Authorised Corporate Service Provider (ACSP). Get the sequence wrong and the appointment can sit in limbo while you're trying to sign a contract, open a bank sub-account, or close a round.

This is the plain-English playbook we give every founder who asks us to add a director. It covers the form, the deadline, the identity verification layer, the detail most people get wrong about service addresses, and the five mistakes we spend our week unpicking at Companies House.

What the AP01 actually does

An AP01 is the Companies House form that tells the registrar: we have appointed a new individual director, here are their details, and here is the date the appointment took effect. There is a sister form — AP02 — for appointing a corporate director, but most founders never touch that one. If your new director is a human, AP01 is the form.

Filing the AP01 does not create the legal appointment by itself. The legal appointment happens through your company's internal process — typically a written resolution of the existing directors or shareholders, signed and dated. The AP01 is simply the public notification. This order matters, because Companies House will only accept the form if the "date of appointment" matches a real resolution you can produce on request.

You have 14 days from the date of appointment to get the AP01 filed. Miss that window and you are technically in breach of section 167 of the Companies Act 2006 — an offence that, in serious or repeated cases, can attract criminal liability for the company and its existing directors. In practice Companies House does not prosecute over a couple of days' slip, but banks and investors doing due diligence do notice when the gap between the resolution and the filing runs into months.

Who can (and can't) be a director

UK company law is deliberately light-touch on who can be a director, but there are hard stops. To be appointed, a person must:

• Be at least 16 years old
• Not be an undischarged bankrupt
• Not be disqualified under the Company Directors Disqualification Act 1986
• Not be subject to a court-imposed restriction preventing company directorship

Nationality is irrelevant — a director can be resident anywhere in the world — and there is no requirement for directors to be shareholders (or vice versa). What matters is that every private limited company must always have at least one natural-person director on the register. If you are relying on a corporate director as your only director, that has been prohibited since the 2024 transition and any appointment you make needs to keep a human in the chair.

The 2026 reality: identity verification comes first

This is the biggest change to the director appointment process in a generation, and it catches founders out almost daily. From 18 November 2025, every new director must have a verified identity at Companies House before they can be lawfully appointed. The AP01 form itself now captures the person's verification reference, and if it is missing or invalid the appointment is treated as unauthorised.

There are two ways a prospective director can verify:

1. Direct with Companies House via GOV.UK One Login — a free, self-service route. You upload a government-issued photo ID, do a liveness check with your phone camera, and receive a personal code in return.
2. Through an Authorised Corporate Service Provider (ACSP) — a firm (typically a formation agent, law firm, or accountant) that is registered with Companies House to verify identities under the same standards the registrar would apply directly. This is often faster for founders who want a supported walk-through and evidence they can keep on file for investors.

Verification is a one-off — your new director does not need to redo it every time they take on another appointment — but it must be completed before the AP01 is filed. If you forget, Companies House will reject the form, your 14-day clock keeps running, and you will be scrambling to get ID verified in time. Filing HQ's identity verification service handles the whole thing end-to-end so the AP01 and the verification can be sequenced as a single workflow.

The information you need to collect

Before you touch the AP01, gather the following from the incoming director. Our experience is that asking for it in one go — rather than drip-feeding over three emails — is the single biggest time saver:

• Full legal name, including any former names used in the last 20 years
• Date of birth (day and month appear on the public register; year is redacted)
• Nationality
• Country of residence
• Business occupation (optional, but most directors fill it in)
• Residential address — kept confidential on the register but required on the form
• Service address — the public address used for official correspondence (more on this below)
• Date of appointment — must match the resolution
• Identity verification reference — issued by Companies House or their ACSP once verification is complete

A detail that catches people out: the residential address is always required on the AP01, but it is not published. What the public sees is the service address. This is by design — directors often (rightly) do not want their home addresses drifting around the internet — but it means a sloppy form can accidentally put a home on the public record when the service address field was left blank.

Service addresses: the detail most founders get wrong

If you take nothing else from this article, take this: do not use a residential address as a service address unless you genuinely do not mind it being public, searchable, and indexed by data brokers forever.

Every director appointed in the UK has a public service address attached to their name on Companies House. That address is:

• Visible on every company the director is attached to, retroactively
• Scraped by dozens of corporate-data aggregators within weeks
• Used by HMRC, the Insolvency Service, and bailiffs for official service of documents
• Almost impossible to truly remove once it has been published, even if you change it later

We covered this in depth in our post on why using your home as a registered office is a bad idea — and the same logic applies to director service addresses, arguably more so because a service address follows the person across every company they direct. A proper London-based service address costs less per year than a single night in a mid-range hotel and keeps your new director's home life genuinely private from day one.

What actually happens after you file

Once the AP01 is accepted by Companies House, three things happen almost simultaneously:

1. The new director appears on the public register, usually within minutes for online filings and a few working days for paper.
2. The company's statutory register of directors should be updated the same day (this is a legal requirement — your internal register is what's legally authoritative, not the public one).
3. Your company's bank, any payment processors, and any investors with information rights will typically spot the change via automated register monitoring within 24–72 hours and may ask for a copy of the resolution.

Be ready for the bank conversation. Most high-street and digital banks require the new director to be added to the mandate, and many will ask for a certified copy of the director's ID, proof of address, and a board resolution before they'll grant signing authority. If you're planning a contract signing, a funding close, or a supplier negotiation that will involve the new director, give the bank at least two weeks after the AP01 is filed before assuming they can sign.

The five most common mistakes we fix every week

1. Filing the AP01 before identity verification is complete. The form gets rejected and the 14-day clock keeps ticking. Verify first, file second — always.
2. Using the residential address as the service address. Once it's on the public register, it's on the public register. No amount of later editing removes historical scrapes.
3. Back-dating the appointment to tidy up a late filing. Companies House will not check it on the day, but an auditor, investor, or HMRC inspector absolutely will — and a date on the AP01 that doesn't match the resolution is an accounting-records problem waiting to happen.
4. Forgetting to update the statutory register of directors. The public register is not the legal record — your internal statutory register is. If a dispute ever reaches court, the statutory register is what's evidenced, and an outdated one is a governance red flag.
5. Not thinking about the knock-on filings. A new director may also be a new PSC, a new signatory, and a new shareholder if you've issued shares to them. Each of those is a separate filing (PSC01, stock transfer form, SH01 for new share issues). Filing HQ's PSC notification service and share issuance service make sure the whole package lands cleanly.

What it costs

Filing the AP01 itself is free through Companies House's online service — there is no filing fee, and paper filings are the same price (free, but much slower). The cost, such as there is one, sits in the bits around the form:

• Identity verification — free direct with Companies House, or a modest fee via an ACSP if you want the supported route.
• Service address — typically a small annual fee for a proper business address, instead of exposing a home on the public record.
• Legal and accounting changes — a new director means updated mandate letters at the bank, updated signatory authority on payment platforms, and an entry in the statutory registers.

The money isn't the issue for most founders. The time is. A "quick" director appointment done properly tends to eat two to three hours of coordination between the existing directors, the new director, the bank, and Companies House — especially if identity verification has not been lined up in advance.

The Filing HQ way

We built Filing HQ for founders who would rather not spend a Friday afternoon reading Companies Act guidance. Our director appointment service takes the whole sequence — resolution template, identity verification (direct or ACSP route), AP01 preparation, service-address setup, statutory-register update, and confirmation back to you — and runs it as one workflow. Most appointments are on the register within 24 hours of you sending us the new director's details.

And because appointing a director almost always sits next to other filings — a PSC notification, a share issue, an updated confirmation statement — our packages bundle the whole year of Companies House activity into a single annual cost, so your compliance calendar is someone else's problem and you can get back to building the business.