One company, two regulators. Here’s what each one wants from you, whether you’re filing from London or Lahore.
So you’ve just set up a UK LTD and you’re staring at two government login screens, wondering why on earth you need both. You’re not missing anything. You’re dealing with two separate relationships that happen to belong to the same company. Your company has two identities, a public face at Companies House and a private ledger with HMRC. Ignore one and the other isn’t going to cover for you.
Companies House keeps your company’s public legal record. HMRC handles your tax relationship with the government. Two jobs, two deadlines, two very different sets of consequences if you drop one of them. Keep the numbers straight too, since they’re not interchangeable: your CRN, the company registration number, belongs to Companies House. Your UTR, the unique taxpayer reference, belongs to HMRC.
Let’s untangle the confusion first.
Companies House is the UK’s company registrar. It holds the public legal record: your directors, shareholders, registered office address, annual accounts, confirmation statement, all of it. Anyone can pull this up online, competitors and clients included.
HMRC is the tax authority. It deals with your Corporation Tax registration, your Company Tax Return, and PAYE or VAT if either applies to you. None of that is visible outside HMRC.
Both are mandatory, and here’s the part people don’t expect: they don’t talk to each other the way you’d assume. Filing with one doesn’t get you off the hook with the other. They run on separate clocks.
You’ll file with both, no way around it. Everything below breaks down what, when, and to whom.
You’re not choosing between Companies House and HMRC. You satisfy both, just at different points along the way. Here’s roughly how it unfolds.
Companies House registers your company, and HMRC gets an automatic heads-up for Corporation Tax purposes. That’s not the same thing as being registered, though. You still have to tell HMRC separately that your company is trading, and you get 3 months from your trading start date to do it [VERIFY current window before publishing]. That 3-month mark, often landing somewhere around Day 90 depending on when trading actually starts, is worth jotting down the moment you incorporate.
This is where most first-timers trip up. You’re prepping your first confirmation statement for Companies House and your first Company Tax Return for HMRC around the same time, and these deadlines almost never line up. That mismatch tends to surface right around the 12-month mark, and it’s probably the biggest source of confusion for new owners.
Once year one’s behind you, it settles into a rhythm. Confirmation statement and accounts on the Companies House side, running alongside your Corporation Tax Return and payment on the HMRC side, plus PAYE or VAT if you’ve grown into needing them.
Swapping a director, changing your registered office, adjusting shareholding? That’s Companies House. Anything touching your tax position gets reported to HMRC on its own. Since neither system shares data with the other automatically, one change in your company can mean updating two separate records by hand just to stay aligned.
Once it’s laid out like this, having someone track both clocks for you stops feeling like a luxury. That’s what our Annual Compliance Service is built for, so you’re not the one carrying two calendars around in your head.
This part is worth bookmarking. Here’s exactly what goes where.
Here’s the bit that trips up almost everyone at some point: “filing accounts” happens in both places, but they’re not the same document. What you send Companies House becomes a public record, searchable by anyone, including customers doing their due diligence. What HMRC gets alongside your Company Tax Return stays private, seen only by the tax authority. Same word, two different things.
If your company hasn’t started trading yet, dormant company filing works a bit differently. You’ll still generally need confirmation statements and accounts filed with Companies House, but you won’t owe HMRC a Company Tax Return until trading actually begins. Just make sure HMRC knows the company’s dormant, so nothing slips through unnoticed.
This page is meant to clear up confusion and orient you, not to give tax advice. Your specific situation, particularly around timing and thresholds, is worth running past a qualified advisor.
If the HMRC side still feels murky, HMRC Compliance Support walks through it with you directly.
Here’s the thing most explanations gloss over: missing a Companies House deadline and missing an HMRC deadline are two separate offenses. Neither one cancels out or excuses the other. Call it the dual penalty trap, and it catches a surprising number of first-time owners who assume dealing with one authority takes care of the other too.
Late filing fines escalate the longer you wait, and if non-compliance drags on, your company risks being struck off the register entirely [VERIFY current fine schedule before publishing].
Late filing penalties apply, and interest keeps building on any Corporation Tax that’s gone unpaid [VERIFY current penalty rates before publishing].
There’s a newer wrinkle worth flagging too. Under the 2025/2026 identity verification rules, if a director or PSC hasn’t completed their check yet, Companies House can simply refuse to accept your filings, confirmation statement included. So even if your paperwork was sitting there ready on time, one unverified director can trigger a compliance failure that has nothing to do with the actual filing itself.
This isn’t meant to scare you. It’s meant to show why having one person watching both clocks, instead of you juggling two systems solo, tends to make the difference between a quiet year and a genuinely stressful one. That’s why our Annual Compliance Service exists.
Say you’re based in Lahore or Karachi, or you’re an NRP living somewhere in the Gulf, and you’ve incorporated a UK LTD without ever setting foot in the country. What does your first 12 months actually look like?
You’ll be running two separate portals from day one: Companies House WebFiling for your public record filings, and HMRC’s online services for tax. Two different logins, two different reference numbers, your CRN for one and your UTR for the other. Neither system talks to the other, so you’re the one holding both threads together.
Worth knowing upfront: the 2025/2026 identity verification requirement applies to you exactly the same as it would a UK-based director. Living overseas doesn’t exempt you, and PSCs carry the same requirement as directors do.
Also worth flagging, since it catches quite a few overseas owners off guard: setting up your Government Gateway login and getting HMRC correspondence, your UTR letter included, can take longer or feel more fiddly when you’re managing it from outside the UK. It’s not usually a dealbreaker. Just something to plan around rather than leave until the deadline’s breathing down your neck.
Get those four sorted early and most of the friction disappears. A clean, on-time record with Companies House is also exactly what UK clients and partners expect to see when they look you up.
If you’d rather have a clear reference for your first year instead of piecing it together as deadlines close in, our UK Company Compliance Checklist for Non-Resident Owners covers exactly this.
A few patterns keep showing up with first-time owners, worth calling out directly.
Filing your accounts with Companies House doesn’t mean your tax is sorted. These are two different documents doing two different jobs, even though the names sound similar.
A lot of older guides floating around online were written before November 2025 and just don’t mention it at all. If what you’re reading skips it entirely, it’s probably out of date.
Incorporating with Companies House is not the same as registering for tax with HMRC. That second step is entirely on you, and it has its own clock, starting the moment you begin trading.
One’s about who owns and controls your company. The other’s about what your company owes in tax. They sound alike. They’re not.
Companies House handles your company’s registration and public record. HMRC handles everything to do with tax.
Yes, pretty much always. Most limited companies file annual accounts and a confirmation statement with Companies House, plus a Company Tax Return with HMRC.
HMRC, and only HMRC. Companies House plays no role in registering or collecting Corporation Tax.
They run on separate clocks entirely. Companies House deadlines follow your incorporation date and accounting reference date, while HMRC’s follow your accounting period end date instead.
Yes. The requirement, phased in from 18 November 2025, applies to directors and PSCs no matter where they’re living [VERIFY current phase status at time of publishing, the 12-month transition period runs through mid-November 2026].
Those count as two separate compliance failures under two separate penalty regimes. Getting one right doesn’t offset the other.
There’s no “better” option between HMRC and Companies House, because they’re not even doing the same job. What you actually need is someone watching both clocks, so neither one sneaks up on you while your attention’s on running the business.
Don’t guess which clock is ticking. Let us manage your UK compliance while you focus on growing the business.
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