How to check a director's identity verification status at Companies House

Every UK company director and PSC has to verify their identity with Companies House, and their status is public. Here are the three ways to look it up, from manual to fully automated - plus the one distinction that decides whether you need to do anything about it.

First: pending is not the same as overdue

Most directors you look up at an active company have now verified. The ones who have not split into two very different groups. Pending means Companies House has recorded a deadline that has not arrived yet - nothing has been missed and nobody owes anything today. Overdue means a recorded deadline has passed with no verification, and that is the only group with something to do.

The difference matters because it is the whole of the action list. In a random sample of 3,000 companies measured on 17 September 2026, 77.8% of directors at active companies were verified, 18.5% were pending and 3.6% were genuinely overdue. A checker that reports one number for "unverified" blurs the small group you must chase into the much larger group you can leave alone.

1. On the Companies House register (free, manual)

Look up the company on the Companies House service, open each officer's record, and check for a verification date. This works fine for one company. It does not work for fifty: expect 2-3 minutes per company, and the answer goes stale whenever an officer changes.

2. With a free online checker (free, instant)

Our ECCTA verification checker aggregates the register data for you: enter a company name or number and get every current director and PSC with their verification status, the names of anyone outstanding, whether each one is pending or overdue, and an overall risk rating - compliant, pending, partial, high risk or unknown.

3. Via the API (automated, for portfolios and products)

One call returns the full compliance snapshot as JSON:

GET https://api.registrum.co.uk/v1/company/{number}/compliance

{
  "directors_total": 3,
  "directors_verified": 1,
  "directors_pending": 1,
  "directors_overdue": 1,
  "directors_unknown": 0,
  "verification_risk": "high_risk",
  "unverified_persons": [
    {
      "name": "SMITH, John",
      "role": "director",
      "status": "pending",
      "deadline": "2027-03-14"
    },
    {
      "name": "JONES, Amara",
      "role": "director",
      "status": "overdue",
      "deadline": "2026-08-28"
    }
  ],
  "eccta_enforcement_deadline": "2026-11-18"
}

Webhooks can also notify your system when a company's compliance risk changes - useful for KYB onboarding flows and continuous monitoring, checked on a 6-hour cycle.

What "unknown" means

Officers appointed before ECCTA data started flowing may show no verification information at all. That is not confirmed non-compliance - it is pre-ECCTA data. A good checker (and our API) reports these as unknown rather than lumping them in with confirmed unverified persons.

Checking a whole client book

If you are responsible for many companies, checking one at a time is the bottleneck. Our free portfolio scan runs your full client list and returns a gap report ranked by confirmation statement date.