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How to get UK company data from Companies House: directors, PSC & officers

Every UK company is registered at Companies House with a unique company number and must file its officers, persons with significant control (PSC) and accounts. Here's how to pull a company's directors, beneficial owners and firmographics as clean JSON — for KYC, due diligence and supplier onboarding.

What is a company number?

The company number is the 8-digit identifier Companies House assigns to every registered company (e.g. 02050399 for Tesco PLC). It's the reliable key for looking up a company, because UK company names can be duplicated, changed or dissolved and re-used.

What data can you get?

Company profile — name, company number, status (active / dissolved / liquidation), incorporation date, registered address.
Directors & secretaries — officer name, role, appointment date and nationality.
Persons with Significant Control — beneficial owners with their control percentage (e.g. owns 75–100% of shares) and notification date.
Firmographics — SIC industry codes and officer / PSC counts for filtering and segmentation.

The easy way (by name or company number)

Companies House offers a free public API, but you have to register a key, respect its rate limit (600 requests / 5 minutes) and stitch together the profile, officers and PSC endpoints yourself. Instead, the UK Company Data scraper on Apify takes a company name or number and returns the merged company profile + officers + PSC as one structured record — no setup, exportable to JSON / CSV / Excel.

Type names (e.g. Tesco, BP) — resolved automatically; or
Paste exact company numbers for guaranteed matches; or
Use Discovery Mode to find companies by SIC industry sector, then bulk-enrich a list for due diligence.

Use cases: KYC & supplier onboarding, M&A / investor screening, beneficial-ownership (PSC) checks, and compliance under the UK Economic Crime Act.

Open the UK Company Data scraper →

Is it legal?

It reads public statutory data published by Companies House under the UK's Open Government Licence. Verify your use complies with the Companies House API terms of use and UK data-protection law (UK GDPR / Data Protection Act 2018).