Last updated: 22 September 2026
This article is general guidance on UK company law compliance and is not legal advice for your specific circumstances. Companies House rules, fees and deadlines change, so confirm the current position on GOV.UK before you act.
Company secretarial services are the administration that keeps a limited company legally compliant with the Companies Act 2006: incorporation, maintaining the register of members, filing the confirmation statement, recording appointments and resignations, processing share transfers and allotments, and keeping the registered office and Companies House record accurate. For a UK practice the work is high volume, low margin and unforgiving, which is why it is one of the first functions to be outsourced.
The field has also moved under everybody’s feet. Four statutory registers stopped being a legal requirement on 18 November 2025, identity verification became compulsory on the same date, and Companies House put its fees up on 1 February 2026. None of the service pages currently ranking for this term mention any of it. This article covers the task list, what changed, what the work actually costs a practice in hours, and how to judge a provider.
Key takeaways
- The scope: four blocks of work: incorporation and setup, the annual cycle, event driven filings, and governance support. The first three are process. Only the fourth is judgement.
- What changed: registers of directors, directors’ residential addresses, secretaries and PSCs stopped being required on 18 November 2025. Only the register of members survives.
- The deadline nobody has scheduled: the identity verification transition runs 12 months from 18 November 2025, and every director and PSC across a portfolio has to be verified inside it.
- The real cost: on a 200 company portfolio our model puts the recurring cycle at around 247 hours a year, and roughly 367 hours in the verification year.
- Pricing: per entity annual retainer, per task, or bundled into the compliance fee. Companies House disbursements sit on top of all three and are not a fee.
- What never moves: the sign off. A provider prepares and files, the practice reviews and takes responsibility to the client.
What is company secretarial work?
Company secretarial work is the set of statutory obligations a company owes to Companies House and to its own members, together with the records that evidence them. It is not the same thing as having a company secretary. A private limited company has not needed to appoint one since 2008, and GOV.UK is explicit that even where a secretary is appointed, the directors remain legally responsible for the company.
That distinction matters commercially. The role is optional. The work is not. Somebody has to keep the record accurate, and for most SMEs that somebody is their accountant, whether or not anyone has agreed a fee for it. ICAEW maintains guidance on the company secretary role for members who take it on formally.
What is actually on the company secretarial task list?
Four blocks, and they behave very differently. Incorporation and setup is one off. The annual cycle is predictable and datable. Event driven work is unpredictable and usually urgent. Governance support is judgement and cannot be scheduled at all.
| Block | What it covers | Nature of the work |
|---|---|---|
| Incorporation and setup | Name check, IN01, share structure, model or bespoke articles, first officers, registered office and registered email, first statutory records | One off, form driven, deadline free but front loaded |
| The annual cycle | Confirmation statement, register of members maintenance, PSC and director data checks, registered office correspondence, dormant filings where relevant | Recurring, datable, and the bulk of the volume |
| Event driven filings | Appointments and resignations, share transfers, allotments, changes of name or registered office, changes of accounting reference date, charges, strike off | Unpredictable, usually urgent, short statutory windows |
| Governance support | Board and shareholder meeting papers, written resolutions, minutes, dividend documentation, share scheme paperwork | Judgement led, needs context, cannot be templated |
The first three blocks are process. They have a right answer, a form, a deadline and an audit trail, which is exactly the profile of work that moves cleanly to a partner. The fourth is advisory. A minute that records a decision the directors did not actually take is worse than no minute at all, and no provider should be writing one without instruction.
One item in the annual block deserves more attention than it gets. A registered office now has to be an appropriate address, meaning somebody will see the post and delivery can be confirmed, and PO boxes no longer qualify. Companies also need a registered email address, which stays off the public register. GOV.UK is blunt about the consequence: a company can be struck off if its registered office does not meet the requirements. On a portfolio, the addresses to check first are the dormant companies nobody has looked at since incorporation.
What changed on 18 November 2025, and why it matters to your portfolio
Two things changed on the same day, and together they are the biggest shift in company secretarial practice in a generation. Four statutory registers stopped being required, and identity verification became a legal requirement for directors, PSCs and LLP members.
The registers you no longer have to keep
From 18 November 2025 companies are no longer required to keep registers of directors, directors’ residential addresses, secretaries or persons with significant control, per the Companies House change programme. That information now lives on the Companies House record and must be kept up to date there instead.
| Register | Position before 18 November 2025 | Position now |
|---|---|---|
| Register of members (shareholders) | Required | Still required, at the registered office or a SAIL address, open to inspection |
| Register of directors | Required | No longer required. Maintained at Companies House |
| Register of directors' residential addresses | Required | No longer required. Maintained at Companies House |
| Register of secretaries | Required | No longer required. Maintained at Companies House |
| Register of PSCs | Required | No longer required. Maintained at Companies House |
There is a trap in that table. Companies that had elected to keep their members’ register at Companies House now have to create and maintain one locally and make it available for inspection. If you look after a portfolio, that election is worth checking client by client, because the obligation moved in the opposite direction to everything else.
My view on the four abolished registers: keep them anyway. They cost almost nothing to maintain once the data is in a system, and on a sale or an investment round the buyer’s solicitor will ask for corporate history that the Companies House record does not present cleanly. Dropping them is compliant. It is not always sensible.
Identity verification, and the deadline sitting in your portfolio
Identity verification became a legal requirement on 18 November 2025, with a 12 month transition period, as the Companies House campaign site sets out. Directors give their Companies House personal code on the company’s next confirmation statement. PSCs who are also directors have 14 days from the confirmation statement date. PSCs who are not directors must verify within the first 14 days of their birth month, per GOV.UK guidance.
The consequence of missing it is not a letter. It is a financial penalty, an inability to make any filing for the company, and an inability to start a new one. For a practice with 200 company clients and an average of under two directors and PSCs each, that is several hundred individuals to identify, contact, explain the process to, and either verify as an Authorised Corporate Service Provider or push through GOV.UK One Login.
This is the single largest piece of unscheduled company secretarial work most UK practices have ever faced, and it does not repeat. We have written the practice level version of it separately in our guide to the Companies House identity verification deadline for accountants.
Statutory work against advisory work: where is the line?
Statutory work has a prescribed form, a statutory deadline and a right answer. Advisory work has none of those. That is the whole line, and it is the line that decides what can be delegated and what cannot.
- Statutory: confirmation statements, appointment and resignation filings, share transfer and allotment records, registered office changes, register of members maintenance, incorporation.
- Advisory: share structure design, pre sale corporate housekeeping, dividend legality against distributable reserves, shareholder agreement questions, anything touching a dispute.
- The grey strip: minutes and resolutions. The drafting is process. What the directors actually decided is not, and a provider cannot know it.
Practices get into difficulty when the grey strip is treated as statutory. A written resolution produced from a template, signed without anyone checking the articles permit it, is a compliance failure dressed as an efficiency.
What can a practice delegate, and where does sign off stay?
Delegate preparation and filing. Keep sign off, client communication on judgement calls, and the relationship. A provider can hold a Companies House authentication code and file as your agent. It cannot hold the responsibility you owe the client, and no engagement letter transfers that.
| Activity | Who does it | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Data collection and register maintenance | Provider | Process work with an audit trail |
| Confirmation statement preparation | Provider | Form driven, checkable against the Companies House record |
| Filing at Companies House | Provider as agent | Mechanical, but only after review |
| Review and approval before filing | Practice | This is the control. It does not move |
| Advising on share structure or dividends | Practice | Judgement, and it carries liability |
| Telling the client a deadline was missed | Practice | The relationship, and the honest conversation |
Put that split in the engagement letter and in the provider contract, in the same words. Where they disagree, you will find out at the worst possible moment. Our outsourced accounting quality control checklist covers how to evidence the review step so the control is real rather than assumed.
What does company secretarial work cost a practice to keep in house?
More than most principals think, because it is never timed. The model below is for a practice with 200 company clients. The task list is real and the Companies House fees are real. The minutes per task are our estimates, shown so you can substitute your own rather than take ours on trust.
| Work | Volume assumption | Time assumption | Hours a year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Confirmation statement cycle | 200 entities | 35 minutes each | 117 |
| Register of members and file housekeeping | 200 entities | 15 minutes each | 50 |
| Registered office post and statutory correspondence | 200 entities | 10 minutes each | 33 |
| Appointments and resignations | 50 events | 20 minutes each | 17 |
| Share transfers and allotments | 20 events | 45 minutes each | 15 |
| Name and registered office changes | 10 events | 20 minutes each | 3 |
| New incorporations | 16 entities | 45 minutes each | 12 |
| Recurring total | 247 | ||
| Identity verification, one off in the transition year | 360 individuals | 20 minutes each | 120 |
| Total in the verification year | 367 |
247 hours is most of a quarter of one person’s chargeable year, spent on work that almost nobody bills at an advisory rate. 367 hours in the verification year is a third of a person. That is the number worth putting next to a provider quote, and it is the number that no page currently ranking for this term will give you. If capacity rather than cost is the driver, our piece on scaling practice capacity makes the same argument across the whole compliance base.
Disbursements sit on top and pass straight through. On this portfolio that is 200 confirmation statements at £50 and 16 incorporations at £100, so roughly £11,600 of Companies House fees a year that is a cost to the client, not a fee to you.
Companies House fees from 1 February 2026
Fees rose on 1 February 2026 to fund the enforcement and identity verification work introduced by the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act, as Companies House explained. The current schedule is published on GOV.UK.
| Filing | Digital | Paper |
|---|---|---|
| Incorporation | £100 | £124 |
| Confirmation statement | £50 | £110 |
| Change of company name | £20 | £30 |
| Voluntary strike off | £13 | £18 |
| Registration of a charge | £14 | £24 |
Two practical points. Paper filing now costs more than double digital on the two filings you make most, so any client still on paper is paying for the privilege. And the confirmation statement is the filing that now carries the identity verification requirement, the registered email address and the lawful purpose statement, per the Companies House confirmation statement guidance, so it is no longer the five minute job it was.
How are outsourced company secretarial services priced?
Three models dominate the UK market, and they suit different portfolios. The right one depends on how event heavy your client base is, not on which looks cheapest per entity.
| Model | How it works | Suits | Watch for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Per entity annual retainer | A fixed annual fee per company covering the recurring cycle, with event driven work either included to a cap or charged extra | Stable portfolios of trading companies with few corporate events | What counts as included. Share transfers are the usual exclusion |
| Per task | A price per filing or per event, with no standing fee | Small or lumpy portfolios, and practices testing a provider | Administration cost of pricing every item, and no incentive to spot missing data early |
| Bundled into the compliance fee | Company secretarial folded into the annual accounts and tax fee at client level | Practices that want one number in front of the client | It disappears from your own costing, which is how it stops being measured |
Whichever model you pick, insist that Companies House fees are shown as disbursements rather than absorbed. A provider who absorbs them is either pricing the risk of a fee increase into your retainer or will come back when fees move again, as they did in February. Our guide to accounting outsourcing cost and pricing models sets out how the same three shapes work across the wider compliance base.
How do you choose a company secretarial provider?
Judge on six things, and ask for evidence on each rather than a reassurance. The questions below are the ones that actually separate providers, because every provider says yes to the generic version.
| Criterion | What good looks like | The question to ask |
|---|---|---|
| ECCTA readiness | Registered as an Authorised Corporate Service Provider, or a clear route for clients who are not | Are you an ACSP, and what is your process for a client who cannot use GOV.UK One Login? |
| Software and records | A named company secretarial system with per entity records, not a shared spreadsheet | What system holds the registers, and who owns the licence and the data if we leave? |
| Review and sign off | Nothing filed without a named reviewer on your side, evidenced | Show me the audit trail for a filing made last month |
| Data protection | UK GDPR terms, named transfer mechanism for any offshore processing, PSC data handled as personal data | Where is director and PSC personal data stored and processed? |
| Professional indemnity | Cover that responds to a late or incorrect filing, at a limit proportionate to your portfolio | What is the limit, and has it ever responded to a Companies House matter? |
| Transition plan | A written onboarding plan covering data extraction, authentication codes and a parallel run | What does week one look like for 200 entities, and who chases the missing data? |
The data protection answer is the one to press hardest, because registers are full of personal data and PSC records are full of sensitive personal data. We set out the specific warning signs in security and GDPR red flags in an outsourced accounting provider, and the onshore against offshore trade offs in offshore versus onshore accounting.
Do not skip the transition question. Moving 200 entities is a data migration, not a handover email, and the failure mode is an entity whose authentication code nobody can find in the week its confirmation statement is due. A written plan and an agreed communication rhythm are what prevent it, which is the case we make in our client communication framework for offshore accounting. If this would be your first outsourcing engagement, our decision framework for first time outsourcing works through the sequencing.
How Acenteus Accounting helps
We run company secretarial as a per entity record rather than a job list. Every company has its own file, its own confirmation statement date, its own officer and PSC position and its own verification status, so the question of what is outstanding across a portfolio has an answer at any point in the year rather than in the week it is due. That sits inside our corporate law outsourcing service.
You can check how that works in practice rather than taking it from a service page. We hold a verified Clutch profile with a 5.0 rating across three client reviews. Shobhana Solanki, Managing Director of TAXTEK CAMBRIDGE LTD in Cambridge, wrote that our “openness to questions and feedback fostered a positive working relationship, which helps to build trust”. A director at a financial services company in Northern Ireland wrote that we “provide high-quality work at a cost-effective rate”.
The same review set notes that clients see room for closer workflow alignment and more proactive suggestions, and that is a fair criticism of most first year outsourcing relationships. Company secretarial is where it bites hardest, because the provider has to raise the missing share transfer rather than wait to be told about it.
For practices, this is usually the easiest function to move first, because the output is checkable against a public record. How the engagement runs, from authentication codes to review turnaround, is on our outsourcing for UK accounting firms page. For businesses incorporating rather than outsourcing an existing portfolio, business setup is the starting point, and our guide to setting up a limited company in the UK covers what to get right on day one.
If you want a number rather than a conversation, send us your entity list and we will come back with the hours and the verification exposure across it.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Company secretarial services are the statutory administration that keeps a limited company compliant with the Companies Act 2006: incorporation, maintaining the register of members, filing the confirmation statement, recording appointments and share transactions, and keeping the Companies House record and registered office accurate.
A company secretary maintains the company's statutory records, prepares and files returns at Companies House, arranges board and shareholder meetings, and keeps the minute book. The duties can be performed by a director, by staff, or by an external provider, because the role and the work are separate things.
No. A private limited company has not been required to appoint one since 2008. Public companies must still have one. Appointing a secretary does not reduce the directors' legal responsibility for the company.
No. They are separate offices, although one person can hold both. A company secretary is not automatically a director and does not carry directors' duties by virtue of the secretarial role, but a secretary who acts as a director in substance can be treated as one.
The register of people with significant control records the individuals who ultimately own or control a company. From 18 November 2025 companies are no longer required to keep it locally, and the information is held and maintained at Companies House instead.
Only the register of members. The registers of directors, directors' residential addresses, secretaries and PSCs stopped being required on 18 November 2025. The register of members must be kept at the registered office or a SAIL address and be open to inspection.
Providers price on a per entity annual retainer, per task, or bundled into the compliance fee. Companies House disbursements are separate: £50 for a digital confirmation statement and £100 for a digital incorporation since 1 February 2026.
On our model for a 200 company portfolio, the recurring cycle runs to around 247 hours a year, and around 367 hours in the year the identity verification transition has to be completed. Substitute your own minutes per task, the volumes are the part that matters.
An ACSP is a firm registered with Companies House to verify identities and file on behalf of clients. Accountants, solicitors and company formation agents can register. Using one is an alternative to a client verifying through GOV.UK One Login.
Failing to verify by the deadline is an offence. The consequences include a financial penalty, and being unable to make any filing for the company or to start a new company.
