The confirmation statement is the easiest filing to forget — and the most expensive

Ask ten UK founders what their confirmation statement deadline is and at least seven will pull a face that lands somewhere between guilt and panic. It's the single most forgotten filing in the Companies House calendar — partly because the name sounds like it might be optional, partly because nothing dramatic happens the day after you miss it, and partly because the email reminders go to whichever inbox you set up the day you incorporated and have not opened since.

Here is the uncomfortable bit: the confirmation statement is the filing that quietly decides whether your company still legally exists. Miss it long enough and Companies House will not fine you. They will do something far worse — they will start the process of striking your company off the register entirely, and your bank, your customers, and HMRC will find out before you do.

This is the plain-English guide we wish every first-time director got handed on day one.

What a confirmation statement actually is

A confirmation statement (form CS01) is your annual declaration to Companies House that the public information they hold about your company is still correct. It is not an accounts filing, it is not a tax return, and it has nothing to do with profit or turnover. You are simply ticking a box that says: yes, the directors, shareholders, registered office, SIC codes, and PSCs you have on file are still right — or here are the changes.

Every active UK limited company has to file at least one confirmation statement every 12 months, even if absolutely nothing about the company has changed in that period. Dormant company? Still required. No trading? Still required. Sole director and shareholder running a side hustle? Still required.

The fee is currently £34 to file online (or £62 by paper, which almost nobody should be doing). That £34 covers a 12-month payment period — you can file as many additional confirmation statements as you want inside that window without paying again, which is useful if your share capital or PSC details change mid-year.

The deadline nobody can quite remember

Here is where most founders trip up. Your confirmation statement is not due on the anniversary of your incorporation. It is due on the anniversary of your last confirmation statement (or, for a brand-new company, 12 months after the date of incorporation). That gives you a review period of up to 12 months, and then a further 14 days after the review period ends to actually file.

So the rhythm looks like this:

• Day 0 — review period starts (incorporation date or last filed CS01)
• Day 365 — review period ends
• Day 379 — confirmation statement must be at Companies House

Fourteen days is not a generous window. If your registered office still points at an old accountant who hasn't forwarded post for two months, the reminder letter is sitting in someone else's pile while your clock runs down.

What actually happens if you miss it

This is the part that surprises people. Unlike late accounts — which trigger automatic civil penalties starting at £150 and climbing to £1,500 — there is no automatic financial penalty for filing a confirmation statement late.

That sounds like good news. It is not.

Instead, Companies House treats a missed confirmation statement as a signal that the company may no longer be in business. The escalation goes roughly like this:

1. Reminder letters to the registered office and to each director's service address.
2. A first gazette notice in The London Gazette announcing the registrar's intention to strike the company off.
3. A second gazette notice roughly two months later confirming dissolution if nothing has been filed.
4. The company is dissolved. It legally ceases to exist.

The moment a strike-off notice is published, three things tend to happen in fast succession. Your business bank account gets flagged and, in many cases, frozen. Any client doing supplier due diligence sees the notice on Companies House and pauses payment. And the assets of the company — including cash in that bank account — risk passing to the Crown as bona vacantia if the dissolution completes.

We have seen founders lose five-figure sums in frozen bank balances over a forgotten £34 filing. We have also seen contracts collapse because a procurement team did a routine register check the morning before signing and saw "proposal to strike off" in red.

You can apply for administrative restoration if it does happen — but you are looking at £468 in fees, weeks of paperwork, and a very awkward conversation with everyone you trade with.

What you actually have to confirm

The confirmation statement reviews and, if needed, updates:

• Registered office address — the official legal address of the company
• SAIL address — where statutory registers are kept, if not at the registered office
• Directors and their service addresses
• Company secretary, if you have one
• People with Significant Control (PSCs) and their details
• Shareholders, share capital, and any share transfers in the period
• Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes — what your company actually does
• Statement of compliance with PSC and register-keeping rules

A few of those — registered office changes, director appointments, PSC updates — actually have to be filed separately and immediately when they happen, not bundled into the confirmation statement. The confirmation statement is the annual check that everything is still right, not an excuse to backfill 12 months of changes in one go.

The five most common mistakes we fix every week

1. Filing too late because the reminder went to an old address. If your registered office is still your old flat, your old accountant, or a service you stopped paying for, the warning post never reaches you.
2. Forgetting that PSC information has to be confirmed even when nothing changed. A blank PSC field is not the same as "no change" — Companies House wants an active confirmation.
3. Listing the wrong SIC codes. Founders pivot all the time. The SIC codes filed at incorporation often describe a business that no longer exists. It is not illegal to be slightly out of date, but banks and lenders increasingly check.
4. Treating share transfers as something the confirmation statement does. It does not. You record them, but the legal transfer happens in your statutory registers and stock transfer forms. Filing HQ's share transfer service handles the full paperwork properly.
5. Paying twice. Once you've paid the £34 fee for a payment period, every additional confirmation statement inside that 12-month window is free. People panic-file and pay again unnecessarily.

How to never miss one again

The honest answer is that willpower is not a system. Every founder we've met who relies on "I'll remember" eventually doesn't. There are three things that actually work:

• Move your registered office somewhere reliable. A real, monitored business address that scans your post the day it arrives means reminders never sit unread. Filing HQ's registered office address service does exactly this — same-day digital scanning, central London address, no more lost letters.
• Put the deadline on a calendar that nags you. Not your inbox. Not a sticky note. A real recurring reminder that fires 30, 14, and 3 days before the filing deadline.
• Outsource it. For most founders, the maths is brutal: an hour of your time every year, plus the risk of forgetting, plus the £34 fee, is more expensive than just letting someone else watch the clock. Filing HQ's confirmation statement service tracks the deadline for you, prepares the CS01, confirms every detail with you in writing, and files it with Companies House — including the fee.

The Filing HQ way

We built Filing HQ because the gap between "this is technically simple" and "founders keep getting burned by it" is enormous in UK company admin. The confirmation statement is the perfect example. There is nothing intellectually difficult about filing a CS01. There is everything practically difficult about remembering, in your fourteenth busy week of the year, that today is the day your fourteen-day grace period started.

If you'd rather spend that fourteenth week shipping product, talking to customers, or finally taking a weekend off, that's the trade we're built for. Our packages bundle the registered office, the confirmation statement, PSC updates, and identity verification support into a single annual cost — so the whole rhythm of staying compliant runs in the background while you run the business.

The cheapest filing on the Companies House menu is the one most likely to take your company down. That's worth fixing properly, just once.