How to find newly registered companies in the UK

If you sell anything to small businesses, a company that registered last week is about as warm as a cold lead gets. It has a bank account to open, an accountant to find, insurance to buy and probably a website to build. Nobody has sold to it yet.

The good news is that all of this is public. The UK register is one of the most open in the world, and every new company appears on it the day it's incorporated. The less good news is that the raw list is messy, and if you write to everything on it you'll waste a lot of stamps. Here's how to get at it, what each route costs, and what to do about the mess.

Option 1: Companies House advanced search

The advanced company search on Companies House lets you filter by incorporation date, company status, type, SIC code and registered office location. Set the "incorporated from" date to a week ago, pick a town, and you'll get a list you can export.

It's free and it's the official source, so it's a sensible place to start. The catch is that it's manual. You'll be running the same search every week, then going through the results one by one to work out which are real trading businesses. For a single town and a bit of patience, that's fine. For anything bigger it gets old quickly.

Option 2: the free monthly data file

Companies House publishes a free company data product: a snapshot of every live company, as CSV files, updated within five working days of each month end. It has the name, number, registered office, company type, status, incorporation date and up to four SIC codes.

If you're comfortable with a spreadsheet or a bit of code, you can filter it to companies incorporated in the last month. The file is big (over two gigabytes once unzipped, far more rows than Excel can open), and it's always up to a month out of date. By the time you've filtered it, the earliest companies on your list have had plenty of other letters.

Option 3: the Companies House APIs

For developers, there's a free REST API for looking up individual companies, officers and persons with significant control, and a streaming API that pushes changes to the register in close to real time. You register an application on the Companies House developer hub to get keys.

This is how you get new companies the same day. It's also a proper engineering job: keeping a connection open, storing what comes through, handling rate limits (600 requests every five minutes on the REST API) and resuming where you left off. Worth it if you're building a product. Probably not if you just want a list of new cafés in Bristol.

The problem with all three: noise

Whichever route you take, you'll find that a big chunk of new companies will never buy anything from anyone. When we counted the week of 21 to 27 September 2026, there were 16,186 new incorporations. After removing the noise, 57% were left.

The rest were things like:

• Formation agent and virtual office registrations. Thousands of companies share a handful of addresses in London and elsewhere. A letter sent there goes to a mailroom, not a founder.
• Holding companies, SPVs and investment vehicles. Often set up by an accountant for an existing client. They don't trade and don't need you.
• Companies at an existing accountant's address. If you're an accountant, these already have one.
• Dormant and property-dealing companies that declare no real activity.

None of this is hidden. It just takes time to spot, especially the address patterns, which only show up when you count how many companies share each registered office across the whole register.

Option 4: a filtered daily list

This is what we built Firstfile to do, so take this section with the appropriate pinch of salt. We read the register as it's filed, strike out the noise above, then have AI models research what's left: what the business actually does, whether it looks like it's trading, whether it has a website, and a generic company email or phone number if it publishes one. Each lead also has the full registered office and the current directors and owners, from the register.

Leads are then scored for the kind of firm you are, because a new scaffolder is a great lead for a van leasing broker and a poor one for a web designer who builds booking systems. You get the list by 7am, filtered to your postcode districts.

It costs £19 a month for up to five districts, or £99 for the whole UK, with a 14-day free trial. Whether that's better value than an afternoon a week with the free search depends on how much your afternoons are worth.

A few things that make any list work better

• Speed matters more than volume. The first two or three weeks after incorporation are when new companies pick their suppliers. A smaller list you act on today beats a bigger one next month.
• Write to a person. Directors' names are public. "Dear Sarah" gets opened. "Dear Sir or Madam" doesn't.
• Say why now. A new company has real deadlines. Tie your message to one of them and it stops being a sales letter.
• Respect objections. If someone asks you to stop, stop, and make sure they don't reappear on next month's list.

Is it allowed?

The register is public and published under the Open Government Licence, so using it isn't the issue. How you contact people is. Limited companies and LLPs count as corporate subscribers, so business email to them doesn't need prior consent, as long as you say who you are and give a simple way to opt out. Sole traders and partnerships are treated as individuals and do need consent for email. Post is the safest channel of all. The ICO's direct marketing guidance is the place to check the detail.