A registered address tells you less than you think

If you want to check a company, the register is the right place to start. But the field people reach for first, the registered address, answers a narrower question than it appears to, and in a city of 33 boroughs that narrowness matters.

What the register is for

Companies House describes its job simply: it exists to "incorporate and dissolve limited companies" and to "register company information and make it available to the public". The registered office is the address where a company receives statutory correspondence. That is the whole of its meaning.

It is not a declaration of where the business works, where its customers are, or where its staff turn up in the morning. For small companies the registered office is very often the accountant who files the accounts, or a formation agent selling an address as a service.

How far apart the two can be

The gap is routine rather than exotic. Checking London businesses this week, we read the site of an estate agency that names five branches, all in east and south-east London, and prints a registered office in Teddington, around twelve miles from the nearest of them. Both facts are published by the company. Neither is misleading. They simply answer different questions, and only one of them is about where you can walk in.

That is the normal case, not a scandal. But it means a directory that treats the registered office as a location will put that agency in the wrong part of London, and a search for a local agent will miss it.

Why directories get this wrong

Registered addresses are attractive to anyone building a listings site because they are available in bulk under an open licence, structured and free. Trading addresses are not: they are scattered across company websites in whatever format the designer chose.

So the temptation is obvious, and the result is a directory that looks comprehensive and is quietly misfiled. It is one of the main reasons local listings disagree with each other about where a business is: some took the registered office, others took a trading address, and nobody recorded which.

What to read on the register instead

The register holds more useful signals than the address, and most people never look at them.

• Incorporation date. How long the company has existed, as opposed to how long the brand has been used.
• Status. Active, dissolved, or in the course of being struck off. A proposal to strike off is a live signal worth noticing before you pay anything.
• Filing history. Whether accounts and confirmation statements arrive, and whether they arrive late. Chronic lateness is not fraud, but it is information about how the business is run.
• Previous names. A company trading under a fourth name is not necessarily a problem; it is a question worth asking.
• Officers and their other appointments. Useful when you want to know whether the person in front of you has run this kind of business before, or has recently closed several.
• Charges. Secured lending against the company's assets, which matters if you are about to extend it credit.

The practical version

Use the register to answer: is this company real, how old is it, is it still alive, and does it meet its obligations. Use the company's own website to answer: where does it trade and how do I reach it. Treat a registered office as a postal fact, and nothing more.

And if a directory confidently places a business in a borough, it is fair to ask where that came from. Our own profiles record the source of what we publish, which is the only reason we can tell you that the Teddington address and the five London branches both came from the company itself.

How we checked this

Facts in this piece were taken from the primary sources below and checked on 6 October 2026. Rules and figures change: check the source before you act on anything here.

• Companies House, GOV.UK: what Companies House does and find information about a company
• The branch and registered-office example was read from that company's own website on 6 October 2026