• Complete Confidentiality - no home address details being made public
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• London Address available, no office overheads or costs
• Ideal for UK based Directors
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A registered address is crucial for several reasons, especially if you’re setting up a company.

Its a Legal Requirement: Section 86 of the Companies Act 2006 states that every company in the UK must have a registered office address in the UK. A registered office is the official address of an incorporated company or association.

 Government Bodies and Departments need to be able to communicate with the company, therefore every company needs an address to which all communications can be sent, the main ones being Companies House and HMRC, but other Government agencies may also use the address to contact you.

Communications could be official notices, authentication codes for tax, payroll and tax reminders.

As the registered office address is the address you have chosen for your official correspondence address, it is assumed that any notices or mail sent to that address has been received by the company. Therefore you have to make sure that the address you choose will be effective in receiving mail and passing that onto the company directors. It is the company and directors responsibility to ensure that the address is effective and appropriate. It’s essential for ensuring that your company receives important documents in a timely manner.

A major change in the law, following the 2023 Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act is that a registered office address cannot be a PO box and must be ‘appropriate’ according to the following definition:

Documents sent to the registered office address

• should be expected to come to the attention of a person acting on behalf of the company, and
• any documents sent to that address can be recorded by an acknowledgement of delivery.

As part of effort to make business ownership more transparent, Companies House is responsible for maintaining the Company Register - this includes details of the company, the directors, shareholders and persons of significant control. This is a public register that anyone can view. This information is also sold to other online business databases, so it will appear on more than one website and can also be used to send Directors junk mail.

The registered office address can be at your home, a business premises, office that you lease, a virtual office address provider, accountant or anyone else with a legal address.

So, using your home address for the registered office address is although perfectly legal, but in terms of privacy you may not want to put your home address on a public register, which is why many companies choose to use a different address. If you rent your home, many leases prevent you from running a business from the address, as this can affect council tax and open up the property to business rates as well as the address getting unsolicited mail and visitors long after the tenant has left.

All previous addresses are held on the public record so when you first incorporate a company, ensure that you do not use your home address as its difficult to remove any data from the company register without a very good reason.

You can change the registered office address at any time, this can be done via completing an AD01 form and sending to Companies House but we find the best way is via Webfiling, which enables you to log into your online account and make changes to your company details quickly and if there’s a fee attached to the changes its also cheaper.

The Directors Service Address is included in the price, this is the official address for each Director.

It is their contact address and appears on the public online record.

Companies House send letters for individual Directors at this address. For example, if the annual return has not been completed, the directors plan to dissolve the company or being struck off. The Companies House website lists all the officers of the company with their correspondence address. 

Why would Directors need one?

Your Usual Residential Address is confidential and protected from the public record. However, public authorities, such as HM Revenue & Customs, the police, and credit-reference agencies can access them. By using your residential address as your director’s service address, this will be publicaly visible. However, the fact that the addresses are the same is confidential. Companies House sell information from the company registers to various websites that provide information on Companies and Directors.

Companies House have very little control of this information once sold. You may want to use your registered office address, your accountants address, etc. to prevent your address being entered onto these websites. It is best to do this either during incorporating your company or as soon as you can after starting your business. If the directors service address is ineffective, i.e. there is no response to letters, etc. the Registrar does have the power to ban the use of this address and place the usual residential address on the public register. 

The address of the registered office should also appear on a company’s:

• Business letters, emails and other correspondence
• Other stationery
• Invoices and order forms
• Brochures and other marketing material
• Website(s)

For many virtual office providers, if you choose to use their address just for the registered office address, they would expect you to also have another trading/business address (principal place of business) that you would also put onto any correspondence or marketing materials.

Your actual business day to day address can be separate to your registered office address.

Many providers can offer the business address service which includes the registered office, service address for Directors and also a business address that can be used with suppliers, banks, customers.

This is useful for online traders who sells products, people that work from home (consultants), start-ups currently operating from one of the director's homes or overseas based people that don’t have an actual physical workplace that they can advertise on their website or stationery.

One word of warning regarding VAT registration, virtual office addresses and registered office address providers should not be used to register VAT. When you apply for VAT, you will be requested to provide your principal place of business, this is where the work actually takes place and where all your invoices and financial information will be held. This is the location that VAT inspectors will arrive at and where they would expect to inspect “your books”. So your registered office address is not necessarily your trading address

Wherever your company was registered, (Scotland, Northern Ireland, England & Wales), then that is where your registered office must be based. So, for example, if the company is registered in Scotland and the details are held on the Scottish Register, then your registered office must be in Scotland.

Your choice of address will depend on the kind if image and profile you are trying to portray to your customers to give them confidence in your products and services and increase your sales and brand awareness,.

We have many clients that use our EC1 London virtual office address for its status value but equally we have clients who choose to use our other Sussex Virtual Office location because for their customers the focus is on value for money, price and they don’t really care where a business is based as longs as its delivered on time and presents good value.

For all our clients, by using a registered office provide like I-Support Business, we can ensure that there are low start up costs , so you don’t have to budget for office leases, office fit outs, telephone lines and utilities - so what could be a £12-£15k a year expenditure is a £13 a month or £130 a year cost. The virtual office is a low cost, flexible option to pricey long term leases.

For clients that do have another business address that they can use for the business, our registered office prices are £50 for Sussex and £55 for London, this includes the Directors Service address (for all Directors) and includes free scanning of all your official mail from Companies House. If you do expect to get the day to day business mail from suppliers, we would highly recommend the business address service.

If you have any questions we are more than happy to help, call us or use the contact us form below.