Almost every article about this says the deadline is 18 November 2026. That is the end of the transition period, which is a different thing, and treating it as your deadline is how a company ends up unable to file.
Your actual deadline is set by your own confirmation statement date. For a company with a statement date in February, the deadline passed months ago. For one in December, it is still ahead. The single national date in the headlines is only the point at which the transition window closes for everyone, and almost nobody’s personal deadline falls on it.
Here is the rule, from Companies House’s own guidance on when you need to verify ↗, along with the operational consequences most small companies have not thought through.
The four different deadlines
There is not one rule. There are four, and which applies depends on what roles you hold.
| Your role | When you must have verified |
|---|---|
| Director | By your company’s next confirmation statement filing. Your personal code is part of that filing |
| Director and PSC | Within 14 days starting the day after the company’s confirmation statement date |
| PSC only, not a director | Within the first 14 days of your birth month |
| Added to the register after 18 November 2025 | When first added, or within 14 days of being added |
Read the third row again. A shareholder with significant control who is not on the board has a deadline tied to the month they were born in. Nothing about that is intuitive, nothing about it appears in most summaries, and it is not something a company secretary would guess.
Why the confirmation statement is the pressure point
Identity verification became a legal requirement on 18 November 2025. Since then, the confirmation statement has quietly become a gate rather than a formality.
You cannot file it without a personal code for every director. One unverified director, and the filing does not go through. The company is then late on a statutory filing because of something sitting in one person’s inbox.
That matters for a small company more than a large one, because in a two or three director business the people who need to verify are the same people who are busy running it, and there is no company secretary whose job it is to chase them.
The practical test: pull your confirmation statement due date now, and work backwards. If it is inside the next two months and anybody on the board has not verified, that is this week’s job, not November’s.
What verification actually involves
Two routes, per the Companies House guidance on verifying your identity ↗.
GOV.UK One Login. You do it yourself, online, with one of: a biometric passport, a UK photo driving licence, a biometric residence permit, a biometric residence card, or a Frontier Worker permit. This takes minutes if you have the document to hand and the app works on your phone.
An authorised corporate service provider. An accountant, solicitor or other registered professional verifies you. This is the route for anybody whose documents do not fit the first list, and for people who try the app and get stuck.
Either way you come out with a Companies House personal code. That code is the thing filings need. It is per person, not per company, so somebody who is a director of four companies verifies once and uses the same code four times.
The operational problem nobody plans for
Here is where this stops being a compliance article and starts being a records problem.
Personal codes now sit in the same category as UTRs, VAT numbers and PAYE references: pieces of identifying information the business needs at specific moments, held by specific people, required by a filing deadline. And like all of those, they tend to live in an email from eighteen months ago.
The companies that will handle the next few years of this smoothly are the ones that write it down properly:
- Each officer’s name, role, and whether they are also a PSC
- Verification status and the date it was completed
- The personal code, stored somewhere access controlled rather than in a shared mailbox
- The deadline that applies to that person, which as the table above shows is not the same for everyone
- The company’s confirmation statement date, with a reminder well before it
That is six fields. It is a spreadsheet at a push, and it is a very small database table done properly. The reason to do it properly is that this is not a one off: directors join and leave, PSC holdings change, and each change starts a new 14 day clock.
If you have reached the point where several of these small compliance obligations are each living in their own spreadsheet, that is the pattern described in signs your business has outgrown its software. It is also exactly the kind of thing a custom database report handles well: boring, dated, and expensive to get wrong.
This is the second deadline of the year
For a lot of small UK companies this lands on top of Making Tax Digital for Income Tax, which came in on 6 April 2026 and brought quarterly filing with it. We covered what to do about MTD when it went live.
The pattern across both is the same. The obligation itself is manageable. What catches people is that the deadline is personal rather than national, so generic advice tells you the wrong date, and the only reliable answer comes from your own records.
Which is the argument for having records worth reading. A year end software audit is a reasonable time to ask whether anyone could answer “who has verified and when” without three phone calls.
What to do this week
- Find your confirmation statement date. It is on your company’s Companies House page. Everything else keys off it.
- List everyone who needs to verify. Every director, every PSC, and note who is both.
- Work out each person’s deadline from the table above. Do not assume one date covers the group.
- Verify through GOV.UK One Login if your documents fit, or book an accountant or solicitor if they do not.
- Record the codes somewhere durable. Not a mailbox. You will need them again at every future filing.
Step three is where the time goes, and it is the step most companies skip.
Frequently asked questions
Is 18 November 2026 a real deadline or not?
It is the end of the 12 month transition period that began on 18 November 2025. It is a real date, but it is a backstop rather than your deadline. Most individual deadlines fall before it, set by the confirmation statement or by a birth month.
Does every shareholder need to verify?
No. The requirement covers directors, people with significant control, and LLP members. An ordinary shareholder below the PSC threshold is not caught by it.
I am a director of several companies. Do I verify more than once?
No. Verification is of you, not of a company role. You get one personal code and provide it for each role you hold.
What happens if a director does not verify?
The company cannot complete filings that require that director’s personal code, starting with the confirmation statement. Failure to verify when required is an offence, and the Insolvency Service has already brought prosecutions.
Can my accountant verify me?
Yes, if they are registered as an authorised corporate service provider. That is the designed route for anybody who cannot use GOV.UK One Login.
Does a dormant company still have to do this?
Yes. A dormant company still files a confirmation statement, and the same gate applies to it.