Free Land Registry Search: What's Free and What Isn't

What genuinely is free

Finding out whether a property is registered, and its title number

HM Land Registry's public property search on GOV.UK lets you look up a property by address and see whether it is registered and what its title number is, at no cost. That is genuinely useful as a first step: the title number is the key you need for everything else.

The corporate ownership datasets

Both bulk datasets are published free under the Open Government Licence v3.0:

• CCOD — Commercial and Corporate Ownership Data, for UK-incorporated proprietors.
• OCOD — Overseas Companies Ownership Data, for proprietors incorporated abroad.

You accept licence terms and download the monthly files. This is the important one, because it is the only route to an owner-first search — going from a company to its properties rather than from a property to its owner. Nothing on the GOV.UK title search does that.

Price paid data

HM Land Registry publishes Price Paid Data covering residential transactions, free under the same licence. It is transaction data rather than ownership data — it tells you what sold and for how much, not who currently holds the title.

Companies House

Entirely free: company records, registration numbers, filing history, accounts, officers, and the PSC register. Also the Register of Overseas Entities, which records beneficial owners of overseas entities holding UK property. What it does not hold is any record of what land a company owns — see Companies House vs Land Registry.

What costs money

Fees are those in force at the time of writing; check current pricing with HM Land Registry.

The gap that free sources leave

Free coverage has one structurally awkward hole, and recognising it early saves a lot of time.

You cannot search by owner on the free title service. GOV.UK's search is organised around places. Give it an address, it tells you about that address. There is no field for "company name", because the register is indexed by title, not by proprietor. So the question "what does this company own?" — the question most legal, development and investigative work actually starts from — has no free interactive answer.

The bulk datasets contain the answer. But contain is doing a lot of work in that sentence:

• The monthly files are too large for a spreadsheet. You need a database.
• Company numbers arrive with inconsistent padding and punctuation. Match without normalising and you will get false negatives — stripped leading zeros being the classic case.
• Names carry suffix and punctuation variants, so exact matching misses real holdings.
• Up to four proprietors per title sit across repeated column groups, so most questions need the data reshaped first.
• Address free-text breaks naive CSV parsing.
• CCOD and OCOD are separate files with near-identical but not identical schemas.
• It is a monthly snapshot, so the pipeline has to be re-run to stay current.

None of that is insurmountable — it is an afternoon or two of work for anyone comfortable with a database, and if you need this once, doing it yourself is entirely reasonable. It is when you need it repeatedly, or need it in the next ten minutes, that the arithmetic changes.

When free sources are enough

Genuinely, often. Use the free route when:

• You have one property and want to know if it is registered — the free search answers it.
• You need the authoritative position on a single title — pay the £3 and get the register; no amount of dataset work substitutes for it.
• You are doing a one-off research project and are comfortable processing the bulk files.
• Your question is about a company's identity or finances — Companies House, free.
• You need residential sale prices — Price Paid Data, free.

When they are not

• Owner-first questions where you need an answer now rather than after building a pipeline.
• Recurring work — the processing cost repeats every month.
• Group and SPV tracing, where you are running many entities and name variants and need consistent matching across all of them.
• Fuzzy matching requirements, where the name you have is not the name on the title.
• Director-led questions, which need Companies House appointments resolved and then cross-referenced against ownership data — two sources joined.
• Portfolio screening before ordering registers, where the point is to find which five of two hundred titles justify £3 each.

That last case is where the economics are clearest: screening a portfolio for a few pounds to avoid ordering registers you do not need is straightforwardly cheaper than the alternative. The trade-offs are worked through in free vs paid Land Registry searches.

Sources that are not what they appear

Two cautions on "free property ownership" results elsewhere online:

• Sites offering free owner lookups for residential property are generally either reselling the £3 official copy, showing historic Price Paid Data (a past sale, not current ownership), or offering a free search that ends at a paywall. There is no free public route to the name of a private individual who owns a house.
• Anything claiming to show beneficial ownership is overstating. The register records the registered proprietor. Where that proprietor is a nominee, trustee or SPV, no dataset reveals who ultimately benefits — for overseas entities, the Register of Overseas Entities is the nearest thing.

Where to go next

• Free vs paid Land Registry searches
• HM Land Registry company search
• Who owns this property?
• CCOD data explained