Are shares and shareholders on the public register?

The limited company structure provides several benefits, including limited liability for its owners, tax efficiency, and prestige.

When you look at the potential downsides of running a limited company, the most common topic that comes up is the public register. That’s because certain information about you and your company appears on the public register when you form a limited company so anyone can see it.

Sometimes, prospective company owners can feel uncomfortable about this. However, this information is made public for good reason: to help ensure transparency and, therefore, trust in the companies that are incorporated.

In this blog post, we’ll examine whether a company’s share and shareholder information are published on the public register and explain how and where to find shareholders on Companies House.

Shares and shareholders

Shares are the unit in which ownership of a company is measured. Shareholders, as the name would suggest, are the people – or other companies – who hold these shares. Shareholders are the owners of the company.

Share and shareholder information appears on the Companies House register

This means anyone who is interested can freely (and relatively simply) look up a company on the Companies House register and see how many shares are in the company, the type of shares these are (i.e., what class they are), and who owns them.

The first shareholders of a company also need to provide a service address when they form the company. However, this address does not need to be their home address, nor does it need to be updated for the remainder of the company’s life.

For the most part, there is no address information reported for shareholders. Further, there is no other personal information reported about a person in the position of a shareholder.

However, it’s important to mention that Companies House doesn’t necessarily hold a company’s latest share information. 

Share and shareholder information is included in a company’s incorporation documents. A company reports any changes to its share capital using the appropriate form (for example, an SH01 to show an increase in the number of shares).

However, information about changes to the shareholders themselves (for example, who holds those new shares or who has transferred their shares) does not need to be reported until the company files its next confirmation statement.

This means that there is often a lag between a change in a company’s shareholders and the information being made available on the public record.

Since the confirmation statement only needs to be submitted once a year, shareholder information could sometimes be as much as a year out of date. This is something to bear in mind if you are researching other companies on the register.

When a confirmation statement does and doesn’t show share and shareholder information

If a company has changed its shareholding situation since the last time it was reported to Companies House (for example, on the incorporation documents) and it files a confirmation statement, the latest shareholder information can be found in that confirmation statement.

The confirmation statement will only show shareholder information if a change has taken place since incorporation or the latest filing of the confirmation statement (whichever is more recent). If nothing has taken place during that period, then the confirmation statement will not display any shareholder information.

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For example, if a company formed in 2021 had some of its shares transferred to a new shareholder (also in 2021), the 2022 confirmation statement would show this change. However, if no change took place after that, the 2023 confirmation statement would not show share/shareholder information.

To access the latest shareholder information in this instance, anyone interested would need to look back and locate the last confirmation statement that did include shareholder information.

How to find shareholders on Companies House

Companies House keeps a public register of all UK-registered companies. This is where, among other details, you can find the information reported by companies regarding their shareholders. Here’s a step-by-step guide:

1. Head to the Companies House website and search the register for the company you want to check
2. Click on the appropriate company name
3. Select ‘Filing history’
4. Find and open the most recent ‘Confirmation statement’ (if the company has filed one). If this does not include share/shareholder information, access the previous confirmation statement (if it has filed one)
5. Scroll through the confirmation statements until you see ‘Full Details of Shareholders’, which should be on the second page of the document. Here, you’ll be able to see who holds how many shares, the share class, and the date on which they acquired those shares. 
6. If you do not find any share/shareholder information in the confirmation statement(s) or the company has not filed any, scroll to ‘Incorporation’, where you will find this information. 

Summary

So, there you have it. Yes, share and shareholder information is placed on the Companies House register, but this information is not always up to date.

The more recent the incorporation or last confirmation statement, the more accurate the information is likely to be.

We hope this helps. Please leave a comment if you have any questions. For other helpful business advice and information, visit the 1st Formations blog.