Is the Companies House API down?
No. The Companies House API is responding normally.
Last check 15 Oct 2026, 17:40 UTC. This page refreshes every few minutes. It measures the official REST API at api.company-information.service.gov.uk, not the Companies House website.
Recent incidents
No incidents in the last 7 days. An incident is two or more consecutive failing checks.
Errors and what to do
What does a 429 from the Companies House API mean?
You have used your allowance: 600 requests per 5 minutes per account, also enforced per IP address. It is a rolling window, so you wait for it to drain rather than for a clock boundary. Stop sending, wait, then resume at a lower rate. Retrying immediately makes it last longer. This is not an outage.
What does a 502 or 503 from the Companies House API mean?
The failure is on Companies House's side or in front of it: a gateway could not reach the service, or the service is overloaded or restarting. Your request and key are probably fine. Retry with exponential backoff and jitter, give up after a few attempts, and do not loop at full speed, because every retry still counts against your rate limit. If the status above says down, wait for it to recover.
What should I do while the Companies House API is down?
Queue the work and retry later with backoff, show users the last data you hold rather than an error, and avoid hammering the API: a hard retry loop burns your rate limit and delays recovery on your side. Serving a cached copy of data you have already fetched is the standard fix.
How is this measured?
Registrum's servers send one lightweight search request to the Companies House REST API every 5 minutes and record the status code and response time. Down means two consecutive checks got a 5xx or no answer. An incident is two or more consecutive failing checks, so one blip is not reported as an outage. This measures reachability from Registrum, not every endpoint, and not the Companies House website.
More on the limit itself: Companies House API rate limits.
If you depend on this API
The Registrum API keeps a cache. When Companies House fails or is rate limiting, it returns the copy it already fetched for company profiles, officers, PSCs, search and compliance data, marked as stale in the response, instead of an error. It cannot return data for a company it has never fetched. Try it without a key from the quickstart.
Registrum's own API status is on the status page.