Confirmation Statement 2026: New Fee, New Rules Explained

A lot of directors treat the confirmation statement as the most boring form Companies House makes them file: no numbers, no accountant, just confirm nothing's changed and pay a small fee. That was a reasonable way to think about it in 2023. It's not anymore.

Between March 2024 and November 2025, three separate changes landed on this one filing, and the fee itself jumped by nearly half in February 2026. If the last time you actually read your confirmation statement was more than a couple of years ago, there's a good chance you're about to hit a question on it you've never seen before.

What a confirmation statement actually is

It's easy to conflate this with your annual accounts, but they're unrelated filings on unrelated clocks. Your accounts report what happened financially over the year. Your confirmation statement is a snapshot. It confirms that the information Companies House holds about your company, including your registered office, directors, people with significant control (PSCs), shareholders, share capital, and your SIC code (the code describing what your business does), is still accurate as of a specific date.

Every company and LLP has to file one at least once every 12 months, even if the business is dormant or hasn't traded. If nothing has changed since your last one, you're literally just confirming that. If something has changed, a new director, a different registered office, a shareholder who sold their stake, you update it as part of the same filing.

The fee went up in February 2026

Companies House raised the confirmation statement fee from £34 to £50 for online filing, effective 1 February 2026. Paper filing, which almost nobody uses anymore because it's slower and error-prone, now costs £110. That's on top of a 2024 increase that had already taken the fee from £13 to £34, so directors who haven't filed in a few years might be expecting something closer to the old figure.

The increase is part of funding the wider Companies House reform programme under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 (ECCTA), the same legislation behind the new questions below. Companies House has said fee income now also supports its expanded enforcement and investigation powers, which is a fairly direct explanation for why the cost keeps climbing.

The deadline hasn't changed, but the consequences are worth knowing properly

You have 14 days after the end of your 12-month review period to file. Your review period usually starts on your incorporation date, or the anniversary of your last confirmation statement, and runs for a year from there. You can check the exact date on your company's page at Companies House.

There's no automatic fine for missing it, which surprises people who assume it works like late accounts. What actually happens is closer to escalating pressure: Companies House sends reminders, and if you keep ignoring them, the company can be struck off the register. That means it stops existing as a legal entity, and any assets left in it can pass to the Crown. Separately, failing to deliver a confirmation statement when required is a criminal offence under the Companies Act 2006, and both the company and its officers can be prosecuted, with fines of up to £5,000. In practice most directors never get close to that outcome because they file eventually, but "there's no fine" isn't quite the reassurance it sounds like.

Three new things the filing now asks you to confirm

This is the part that's actually changed the shape of the form.

A registered email address. Since 5 March 2024, every company must give Companies House an email address as part of its filing obligations, separate from its registered office address. It isn't published on the public register, but Companies House uses it for official correspondence, and you're required to keep it current the same way you'd keep your registered office current. If you set this up once in 2024 and haven't touched it since, check that it's still an inbox someone actually reads and not the email of a director who left two years ago.

A statement that future activities will be lawful. From 5 March 2025, every confirmation statement includes a box confirming that the company's intended future activities are lawful. It sounds like a formality, and for the overwhelming majority of businesses it is, but Companies House will reject the filing outright if the box isn't checked. It's a small addition with an outsized ability to hold up your filing if you're rushing through it without reading each screen.

Director identity verification. From 18 November 2025, Companies House began requiring directors and PSCs to verify their identity, either directly with Companies House or through an authorised corporate service provider, and confirming that as part of the confirmation statement process. There's a transitional period running to November 2026 for existing companies to get everyone verified; new directors appointed after the rules took effect need to verify at the point of appointment. If your board hasn't gone through this yet, don't leave it until the same week your confirmation statement is due.

Why this catches directors off guard

None of these individually is complicated. What trips people up is that the confirmation statement used to be a five-minute job you didn't think about, and now it's a form where getting something wrong (an unchecked box, a stale email address, an unverified director) can mean a rejected filing and a scramble against your 14-day deadline. The businesses that handle this smoothly tend to be the ones that treat their statutory information as something to keep current continuously. They update the register the week a shareholder changes, not the week the confirmation statement is due, rather than reconstructing it once a year under time pressure.

This is exactly the gap Founders Ledger's statutory register tools are built to close. Instead of digging through old paperwork every twelve months to work out who your PSCs are or when a director was appointed, your register stays live as changes happen, so filing your confirmation statement becomes a five-minute check against records you already trust. It sits alongside the live bookkeeping and corporation tax estimate tools that do the same job for your financial filings. You can see how it fits together at foundersledger.co.uk.

This article is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of writing (August 2026) but isn't a substitute for professional advice. Companies House fees and filing requirements do change, so check current figures on the Companies House website or with your accountant before filing.