Company Data Product FAQs

Why has Companies House developed a free product?

Companies House is now part of the Public Data Group (with Met Office, Ordnance Survey and Land Registry). The group was set up to maximise the value of the data held by member organisations, for longer term social and economic benefits. This includes making a range of core data sets available free of charge.
These aims fit well with CH’s existing strategy, to make more information available for free where possible.
This product delivers on these objectives, making core company information available free of charge.

What information will be included in the product?

The information made available will include; the company number, address, status, incorporation date, account and annual return filing dates, SIC code, URI and basic information about mortgage charges.
A link on the screen called ‘PDF’ will display a description of the data in the files

Using Microsoft Excel 2003 and its limitations

We recommend using Microsoft Excel 2007 or later. Excel 2003 has a maximum limit of rows per worksheet and our files contain considerably more rows than that, so it would open a worksheet containing just the first 65k rows of the file and display a 'File not loaded completely' error message.
There are workarounds for this, involving using a Visual Basic macro but you may find it easier to split the file up yourself into a set of smaller files (each one of 65k rows or less) to allow Excel 2003 to open them easily and there are CSV splitters freely available that do this on the Internet.
Or you could import the file into MS Access 2003 (or later) if that is available to you, as that has a higher row limit.

Size of files

What order should I download the files in?

The data in the files is in alphabetical order based on Company Name but can be downloaded in any order.

Time to download?

Average UK Broadband speed is 7.6Mbps (source Ofcom, Nov 2011), so each file can take up to several minutes to download.

Why is the download in CSV format?

In order to keep things as simple as possible and ensure the widest possible compatibility, we have provided the file in CSV (comma separated value) format which commonly available software (such as MS Excel) is able to import automatically. It is also ‘human-readable’.