The short answer. There is no single 18 November deadline. Existing directors must verify when their company files its next confirmation statement in the transition that began on 18 November 2025, so for many companies the date has already passed. A company cannot file its confirmation statement until every director is verified, and the first directors were fined for it on 16 September 2026.
The date everyone repeats is 18 November. It is not in the regulations. For a lot of directors the real date has already been and gone, and in September the first of them went to court.
On Wednesday 16 September, three company directors were fined at City of London Magistrates’ Court. The fines were £166, £307 and £80, plus £85 costs each. Two were directors of one small company and the third ran another. The charges were administrative rather than anything grander: each had kept acting as a director without verifying their identity with Companies House, and each company had failed to file its confirmation statement on time.
The amounts are small. That is not the point. They were the first prosecutions under the new identity rules, and the Insolvency Service announced them with a press release written as a warning to everybody else. Being made an example of costs very little money and a great deal of time.
What is the real Companies House verification deadline?
Ask most directors when they need to verify and you will hear “by November”. Accountants have said it, formation agents have said it, and, in the interests of full disclosure, so did we in July. We have corrected it.
The regulations say something different. The transitional period is twelve months beginning on 18 November 2025. Within that period, a company must deliver a verification statement for each existing director “at the same time as the company delivers its next confirmation statement”. The duty is attached to your confirmation statement, not to the calendar.
So a company whose confirmation date fell in March should have verified its directors in March. One whose date is in October has until then, plus the usual fourteen days to file. Only companies whose dates fall in the last few weeks of the window actually get anything like November. For everybody else, November is a date they have already missed or a date that never applied.
And the mechanism has teeth of its own. Companies House says plainly that a company “will be unable to file its confirmation statement unless all its directors are verified”. A director who has not verified does not just risk a penalty. They stop the company filing, and a company that does not file its confirmation statement is committing an offence of its own. That combination is exactly what put all three directors in front of the magistrate.
Where the country actually is
Companies House publishes a quarterly count. At the end of June 2026, 55 per cent of director appointments were verified. That was up from 32 per cent in March and 8 per cent at the end of December.
Those figures count appointments, not people. Somebody who sits on four boards is four appointments. And a large part of the unverified 45 per cent is not in breach at all, because their company’s confirmation date had not yet come round.
Still, the arithmetic is worth a moment. By the end of June the transitional period was seven and a half months old, a little over 60 per cent of the way through. If confirmation dates were spread evenly across the year, you would expect the verified share to be at least that high, and higher once early volunteers are counted. At 55 per cent it was behind. That is our calculation rather than an official one, and the spread of dates is not perfectly even, but the direction is hard to argue with.
The next release, covering July to September, should show whether the gap closed over the summer or widened.
What has moved, and what has not
If you read about this earlier in the year, some of what you read has since changed. It helps to know which half.
Not moved. Acting as a director without verifying has been an offence under section 167M of the Companies Act since 18 November 2025. The company and every officer in default commit it too. In England and Wales the fine is unlimited. Separately, Companies House can impose civil penalties of up to £10,000 each. And every new director and every new company has had to verify first since that same date.
Moved. The next stage, under which anybody filing on a company’s behalf must be verified and agents must register with Companies House, was due in November 2026. It is now no earlier than November 2027. Software-only accounts filing, and the end of abridged accounts for small companies, has moved to April 2028.
The dangerous misreading is to hear “moved” and apply it to the part that has not. The delays are about agents and accounts. The duty on directors is live, and it is being prosecuted.
People with significant control run on a different clock
If you are a person with significant control, typically holding more than a quarter of the shares or votes, but are not a director, your date has nothing to do with the confirmation statement. According to Companies House guidance, you provide your personal code within the first fourteen days of your birth month. If you are both a director and a person with significant control, the PSC part has its own fourteen day window starting the day after the confirmation statement date, through a separate service.
This is the part most likely to catch out founders who brought in an investor, a co-owner or a family member as a shareholder. They will not think of themselves as having anything to do with Companies House. They do.
The email that is not from Companies House
Wherever a deadline creates anxiety, somebody sells a shortcut. Companies House keeps a list of scam emails pretending to be from it, and it has been adding identity themed ones, including messages telling you to “verify your identity within 24 hours”. Suspect ones go to phishing@companieshouse.gov.uk.
It does not help that in August GOV.UK One Login became the main way to sign in to Companies House services. Being asked to sign in is not the same as being asked to verify. Verifying through GOV.UK is free. An urgent email with a link and a fee is a strong sign you are dealing with somebody else.
The fifteen minute version
- Look your company up on the Companies House register and note its confirmation statement date. That, not November, is your date.
- Verify through GOV.UK One Login, which is free. Photo ID works, as does a route using bank details, and you can do it in person at a Post Office.
- Keep your personal code safe. It is one code per person, used for every company and role you hold.
- Check every other director and every person with significant control, not just yourself. One unverified director is enough to stop the filing.
- If your confirmation date has already passed and you have not verified, deal with it this week rather than waiting to see whether anybody notices. As of September, somebody does.
None of this is difficult. It is the kind of administration that is easy to put at the bottom of a list because nothing seems to happen when you leave it there. Until September, that was true.
Do you know your company’s confirmation date, or were you planning to find out in November?
Setting up a new company? Identity verification is now step one. Our free Starting a Business Checklist puts it in order with everything else you need to register, what each costs and when it is due.