Statutory Registers 2026: What UK Companies Still Have to Keep

If you've still got a statutory registers binder from when you formed the company, complete with a printed register of directors and a PSC register you dutifully updated every time something changed, most of that paperwork stopped being a legal requirement on 18 November 2025. Companies House didn't announce this loudly, and a lot of the accountancy guides still floating around online haven't caught up. So here's what actually changed, and the one register you still need to keep an eye on.

What changed on 18 November 2025

As part of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act (ECCTA) reforms, Companies House stopped requiring companies to hold their own local copies of four registers:

the register of directors
the register of directors' residential addresses
the register of secretaries (where one is appointed)
the register of people with significant control (PSC)

Companies House now holds this information centrally, and it's their record that counts. You don't need to maintain a parallel paper or digital register of your own for any of these four.

That doesn't mean the underlying obligations disappeared. You still have to tell Companies House about changes to directors, secretaries or PSCs within 14 days of them happening, exactly as before. You still have to confirm this information is accurate as part of your annual confirmation statement. And if you're a director or PSC who hasn't completed identity verification yet, that requirement is still very much live and rolling out through birth-month deadlines into 2026. What's gone is the extra step of also writing it all down yourself in a company register nobody but your accountant ever looked at.

The one register that's still entirely on you

The register of members, meaning your shareholders, wasn't touched by this reform. Every private limited company still has to maintain its own register of members, recording who holds shares, how many, what class, and when they acquired or transferred them. It has to be kept at your registered office or a notified single alternative inspection location (SAIL address), and it's legally the authoritative record of who owns the company. If there's ever a dispute about shareholding, it's your register of members that gets consulted, not whatever Companies House happens to show.

Interestingly, refusing a proper request to inspect it is a criminal offence committed personally by every officer of the company. It's one of the few pieces of statutory admin that still carries that level of consequence, so it's worth actually keeping current rather than assuming it'll sort itself out at year end.

The trap: companies that used the central member register option

Since 2016, companies have had the option to hold their register of members centrally at Companies House instead of keeping it themselves, an "elect to keep information on the central register" arrangement some smaller companies used to cut down on paperwork. If your company did this, there's a date worth knowing: that option was withdrawn on 26 January 2026.

If you elected into it and haven't since brought your register of members back in-house, you're technically out of compliance right now. This is a genuinely easy thing to miss, because most of the coverage of the November 2025 reforms focused on the officer registers being scrapped, not on this separate, later change to the member register option. If you're not certain whether your company ever made that election, it's worth a quick check with whoever handles your company secretarial admin, since it's not something Companies House will chase you about until it becomes a problem.

What about the register of charges?

Historically, companies also had to keep a register of charges, recording mortgages and other security granted over company assets. That local record-keeping requirement was actually phased out back in 2013 for charges created from 6 April of that year onward, well before ECCTA. In practice, most companies still keep copies of charge documents on file anyway, partly because lenders often expect it and partly because it's genuinely useful to have your own record of what's secured against the business, even though it's no longer a strict statutory obligation in the way it once was.

Where this leaves you

For most small companies, the practical checklist now looks like this: keep your register of members up to date every time shares move, make sure directors and PSCs are correctly filed with Companies House within 14 days of any change, get identity verification done if you or your PSCs haven't already, and if your company ever opted into the central member register, confirm you've got a proper local one again post-January 2026. Everything else that used to live in the statutory registers binder is now Companies House's job to hold, not yours.

This is an area of company law that's still actively rolling out, so it's worth treating anything you read (including this) as correct only as of when it was written, and checking gov.uk or your accountant before relying on it for anything with real consequences. It isn't legal or financial advice.

It's also exactly the kind of admin that's easy to lose track of alongside actually running the business, which is part of why we built Founders Ledger to keep your PSC and shareholder details alongside your live bookkeeping and tax estimates in one place, rather than in a binder nobody opens until it matters. You can see how it works at foundersledger.co.uk.