Companies House identity verification if you live outside the UK

Short answer: if you hold a biometric passport from any country, you can almost certainly verify your identity yourself, free, using GOV.UK One Login — from anywhere in the world. You do not need to be in the UK, and you do not need UK-issued ID. The routes that are genuinely UK-only are the Post Office and the bank account check. Most articles on this subject get that wrong, and it costs overseas directors money they didn't need to spend.

Who this applies to

Identity verification is a requirement of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act. It attaches to the person, not the place. If you are a director or a person with significant control (PSC) of a UK company, you must verify — whether you live in Manchester, Lagos, Dubai or Toronto.

There is no separate overseas regime. Same requirement, same personal code, same register. What differs is only which of the four verification routes are open to you.

The four routes, and which work from abroad

GOV.UK One Login — the free route, and it is open to you

One Login accepts a biometric passport from any country. It also accepts a UK photo driving licence, a UK biometric residence permit, a UK biometric residence card, or a UK Frontier Worker permit — but the passport is the one that matters here, because it is not UK-specific.

You will also be asked for your current address and the year you moved in. Your address being outside the UK is not a barrier.

The document must be current. GOV.UK is explicit that you cannot use expired documents on the One Login or bank routes.

If you have a biometric passport and a smartphone that can read its chip, try this first. It is free and usually takes minutes. Anyone who tells you overseas directors have no free option is either mistaken or selling something.

When One Login genuinely does not work

It fails for a real minority of people, and these are the situations we see:

• Your passport is not biometric, or is a type the app cannot read
• Your phone cannot complete the chip read, or the app is unavailable in your country
• Your passport has expired, or is close enough to expiry to fail the check
• You are relying on a national ID card that is not on the accepted list
• The liveness or face-match step repeatedly fails

If you hit one of those walls, the ACSP route exists precisely for you.

The ACSP route explained

An Authorised Corporate Service Provider is a firm registered with Companies House and supervised for anti-money-laundering purposes — typically an accountant, solicitor or formation agent. An ACSP can carry out the identity check and confirm the result to Companies House on your behalf.

Instead of an app reading your passport chip, a qualified person reviews your documents directly. GOV.UK sets out two ways this can be done:

• One photographic document checked using identity verification technology; or
• Two documents — either two photographic documents from Group A, or one from Group A plus one from Group B.

For someone who does not live in the UK, GOV.UK requires at least one government-issued document. In practice that usually means a passport or national identity card.

The practical advantage for overseas directors is that the check is done by a human who can work with what you actually hold, rather than an app that either reads your chip or doesn't.

What happens after you verify

You receive an 11-character personal code. It belongs to you, not to any company. You will need it whenever you are appointed as a director or PSC, and eventually when filing.

If you verified through an ACSP, Companies House emails the code to the address the agent gave them — so make sure your agent has an address you actually check, and look in your spam folder. If you verified through One Login after 8 July 2026, the code is emailed to you and is also visible in your Companies House account under 'Manage account'.

You can share your code with an agent who files on your behalf. You should not publish it or hand it to anyone else.

Which route should you choose?

Use One Login if you hold a current biometric passport and can complete the app check. It is free, immediate, and there is no reason to pay for it.

Use an ACSP if the app route has failed, your documents don't fit it, you're short of time, or you would simply rather someone competent dealt with it. That is a legitimate reason to pay — but you should be choosing it with the free option properly explained, not because you were told it didn't exist.