Free covers more than people expect — registration status, title numbers, Companies House, and the bulk corporate ownership datasets. Paid covers two specific gaps: the £3 official copy, which is the only authoritative source for charges and boundaries, and indexed search, which buys owner-first querying without building a data pipeline.
What each route costs and gives you
| Route | Cost | Gives you | Does not give you |
|---|---|---|---|
| GOV.UK property search | Free | Whether an address is registered; its title number | Owner name, charges, any owner-first search |
| Official copy of register | £3 / title | Proprietor, charges, restrictions, covenants — authoritative | Any portfolio view; you need the title number first |
| Official copy of title plan | £3 / title | Boundaries and extent | Ownership detail |
| CCOD / OCOD bulk files | Free under licence | Every corporate-held title with its proprietor; owner-first analysis | Charges, boundaries, individuals — and it needs a database and a pipeline |
| Companies House | Free | Company identity, officers, accounts, PSCs, overseas entities register | Any record of what land a company owns |
| Indexed search tool | Per search / subscription | Owner-first search, normalised and fuzzy-matched, CCOD+OCOD combined | Charges, boundaries — still register matters |
The gap free sources leave
There is one structural hole, and recognising it early saves a lot of fruitless clicking. GOV.UK's title search cannot be searched by owner. It takes an address and tells you about that address. There is no company-name field, because the register is indexed by title rather than by proprietor.
So the question most professional work starts from — "what does this company own?" — has no free interactive answer. The information exists, free, in the bulk datasets. But turning those files into something you can query means loading them into a database, normalising company numbers (preserving leading zeros), normalising name variants, reshaping up to four proprietors per title out of repeated columns, aligning the CCOD and OCOD schemas, and re-running it all monthly.
That is a genuine piece of work, not an insurmountable one. Which is exactly why the decision is a real trade-off rather than an obvious answer.
Use the free route when…
- You have one property and one question. Is it registered, what is the title number — GOV.UK, free.
- You need the authoritative position on a single title. Pay the £3. No dataset substitutes for the register, so this is the cheap answer, not the expensive one.
- Your question is about the company, not the land. Companies House, free.
- You are doing a one-off research project and are comfortable with a database. Download the files.
- You need residential sale prices. Price Paid Data, free.
- You want beneficial owners of an overseas entity. Register of Overseas Entities, free.
Pay when…
- The question is owner-first and time matters. Building a pipeline is a poor use of an afternoon you do not have.
- The work recurs. The processing cost repeats every month; that is where doing it yourself stops being free.
- You are tracing groups and SPVs. Many entities, many name variants, consistent matching across all of them — this is where hand-rolled matching quietly produces false negatives.
- The name you have is not the name on the title. Fuzzy matching is doing real work here.
- The question runs through a person. Director searches need Companies House appointments resolved and then cross-referenced against ownership data — two sources joined, per company.
- You are about to order registers on a portfolio. See below.
Next step
Screen before you spend
Identify which titles a company holds, then order official copies only for the ones that matter.
The arithmetic that usually decides it
The clearest case for paying is not "free versus paid" at all — it is paying a little to avoid paying a lot.
Suppose a target company's portfolio turns out to be fifty titles. Official copies at £3 each is £150 to read every register, and most of those registers will tell you nothing you needed. Screening first identifies which entity holds what, which titles are leasehold (where terms matter), which have anomalous proprietor entries, and which are the material assets. You then order perhaps eight registers — £24 — chosen for reasons you can articulate.
The screening cost is trivial against the saving, and the more important gain is that your escalation decisions are now defensible rather than arbitrary. That logic is set out in CCOD vs the title register.
What no amount of money buys
Worth being clear, because paid services sometimes imply otherwise:
- Beneficial ownership of a domestically held title. Not disclosed by the register at any price. Overseas entities are the partial exception via the Register of Overseas Entities.
- Search by individual's name. Not offered, free or paid.
- Unregistered land. In no register.
- Short leases. Not registrable, so not recorded.
- Scotland or Northern Ireland from HM Land Registry data. Separate registers entirely.
- Real-time currency. Registration lags completion regardless of what you pay.
Read next
- Free Land Registry search: what's free and what isn't
- HM Land Registry company search
- CCOD vs the title register
Frequently asked questions
When is a free Land Registry search enough?
When you have one property and only need to know whether it is registered and what its title number is — GOV.UK answers that free. Also when your question is about a company's identity or finances, which Companies House answers free, or when you are willing to download and process the bulk corporate ownership datasets yourself.
What do you actually pay for?
Two things. Official copies of individual title registers and plans, at £3 each at the time of writing, which is what buys you charges, restrictions, covenants and boundaries. And indexed search over the bulk datasets, which is what buys you owner-first search without building and maintaining your own data pipeline.
Is it cheaper to order registers or to screen first?
Screening first is almost always cheaper on any portfolio of more than a handful of titles. At £3 per official copy, ordering speculatively across fifty titles to find the five that matter costs far more than screening to identify those five and ordering only those.