The distinction in one line: Companies House tells you who a company is; HM Land Registry tells you what it owns. Neither answers the other's question, and they are not linked. Serious ownership work always uses both — the company number from one is the key that makes the other reliable.
Two registers, two different jobs
A great deal of wasted effort comes from expecting one register to do the other's work. People search Companies House for a property list and find nothing; people search the Land Registry for a company's accounts and find nothing. Both searches were always going to fail, because the registers were built for different purposes.
Companies House is the register of legal entities. It exists so that anyone dealing with a company can establish that it exists, who runs it, who ultimately controls it, and what it has filed. It is organised around the company.
HM Land Registry is the register of interests in land. It exists to guarantee title, so that ownership of a defined parcel can be established and relied upon. It is organised around the title.
Neither is organised around the relationship between a company and its land — which is precisely the relationship most investigations care about. Bridging it is a manual step, and the bridge is the company registration number.
Side-by-side comparison
| Companies House | HM Land Registry | |
|---|---|---|
| Answers | Who is this company? Who controls it? What has it filed? | Who holds title to this land? On what terms? |
| Organised around | The legal entity | The registered title |
| Geographic scope | UK-wide, plus overseas entities registered here | England and Wales (Scotland and NI have separate registers) |
| Key identifier | Company registration number | Title number |
| Shows property holdings | No — only a fixed-asset figure in accounts, never itemised | Yes, per title |
| Shows officers and control | Yes — directors, secretaries, PSC register | No |
| Shows financial position | Yes — filed accounts | No |
| Shows charges | Yes — the register of charges against the company | Yes — charges against the specific title |
| Shows beneficial ownership | Partly — PSC register for corporate control | No — registered proprietor only |
| Searchable by owner name | Yes | Not via the public title service; possible through the bulk ownership datasets |
| Cost | Free | Datasets free under licence; official copies £3 per title at the time of writing |
| Update cadence | Continuous, as filings are made | Register continuous; bulk ownership datasets monthly |
The one place they overlap: charges
Both registers record charges, and they are not the same charges. Companies House records charges granted by the company — a debenture, a floating charge over its assets. HM Land Registry records charges registered against a specific title — a legal mortgage over that property.
A company can have a floating charge at Companies House with no corresponding entry on any title, and a title can carry a legal charge whose lender tells you nothing about the company's wider borrowing. If security is the question, both need checking, and neither substitutes for the other.
Combining them: the working sequence
1. Fix the entity at Companies House
Establish the exact legal entity and collect the identifiers that make the property search work:
- The full registration number, leading zeros intact.
- Every former name with its change date — titles are frequently still registered under the old one.
- Group relationships from the parent's accounts, where subsidiary undertakings are usually listed.
- Registered office and its history, useful for corroborating a proprietor address later.
- Incorporation date, which lets you reject impossible matches.
2. Run those identifiers against the ownership data
Search the number for precision and each name variant for recall. The full sequence is in company property search UK.
3. Reconcile in both directions
This is the step that turns two searches into one defensible answer:
- Does the registration number on the title row match the entity you fixed in step 1?
- Is the proprietor address consistent with a registered office the company actually held at that time?
- Does the proprietorship category fit — a limited company row for a limited company, not a local authority?
- Does the date proprietor added fall after incorporation? If not, it is a different company with a similar name.
A ten-minute version of this loop is set out in how to cross-check ownership in ten minutes.
Next step
Bridge the two registers
Take a company name, number or director straight to the matching HM Land Registry titles in one search.
Where each register runs out
What Companies House will not tell you
- Which properties the company owns. Accounts may show a fixed-asset total; they never itemise addresses or titles.
- Whether an asset is owned or leased, beyond what the accounting policies disclose.
- Anything about property held by directors personally.
- The full beneficial chain, where PSC exemptions or opaque intermediate structures apply.
What HM Land Registry will not tell you
- Who controls the proprietor. An SPV's registered proprietor entry reveals nothing about its ownership.
- Whether the proprietor holds beneficially or on trust. A nominee looks identical to an owner.
- The company's financial standing.
- Unregistered land, which is in no dataset at all.
A note on overseas entities
Where property is held by a non-UK company, two additional sources matter. HM Land Registry publishes OCOD — Overseas Companies Ownership Data — covering titles held by overseas-incorporated proprietors, with a country-of-incorporation field. Separately, Companies House maintains the Register of Overseas Entities, introduced by the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Act 2022, which requires overseas entities holding UK property to register their beneficial owners.
Together those two get considerably closer to a beneficial-ownership answer than either register does for a domestic structure — which is worth knowing, because the offshore case is sometimes the more transparent one. Coverage is discussed in overseas companies owning property in England and Wales.
Where to go next
- Cross-check ownership in ten minutes
- Company property search UK
- Director property search
- CCOD data explained
Frequently asked questions
Does Companies House show what property a company owns?
No. Companies House holds the corporate record — incorporation, officers, filing history, accounts and the PSC register — but it does not record land or property holdings. Property ownership is registered at HM Land Registry, and the two registers are not linked. Fixed assets may appear as a balance-sheet figure in the accounts, but never as an itemised list of properties.
Which register should I search first?
Companies House first, to establish the exact entity, its registration number and any former names or related companies. Then take those identifiers to the ownership data. Starting the other way round works when you have a property and want the owner, but for a company-first question the corporate record is what makes the property search accurate.
Can I find a person's property through Companies House?
Only indirectly, and only for corporate holdings. Companies House shows a person's directorships and PSC positions; those companies can then be checked against corporate ownership data. Property held by that person personally is not in corporate ownership data at all, and individual ownership is not searchable by name at HM Land Registry.
Are both registers free?
Companies House search is free. HM Land Registry publishes the corporate ownership datasets for download under licence at no charge, but official copies of individual title registers carry a per-title fee — £3 at the time of writing.