The thing people are looking for does not exist as an official service. HM Land Registry's public search is organised around properties, not owners, so there is no official "search by company name" tool. What HM Land Registry does publish is the corporate ownership data in bulk — CCOD and OCOD — which contains exactly that information and can be indexed by owner.
What HM Land Registry actually offers
It is worth laying out the services clearly, because the mismatch between what exists and what people expect causes a lot of fruitless searching.
| Service | You give it | You get | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search for property information | An address | Whether it is registered, and the title number | Free |
| Official copy of the register | A title number | Proprietor, charges, restrictions, covenants | £3 per title |
| Official copy of the title plan | A title number | Boundaries and extent | £3 per title |
| CCOD dataset | — | Every UK-corporate-held title with its proprietor | Free under licence |
| OCOD dataset | — | Every overseas-corporate-held title with its proprietor | Free under licence |
| Price Paid Data | — | Residential transaction prices | Free under licence |
| Business/commercial data services | Varies | Bulk and API access for high-volume users | Commercial terms |
Notice what is missing from the second column: nowhere can you give it a company name and get properties back. Every interactive service takes a place or a title number as its input.
Why there is no official company search
Not an oversight — a consequence of what the register is for. HM Land Registry exists to guarantee title to defined parcels of land. The register is therefore indexed by title: each entry describes one parcel, its extent, its proprietor and the burdens on it. The proprietor is an attribute of a title, not an index into the register.
There is also a privacy dimension. Most registered titles in England and Wales are held by private individuals. A searchable index of individuals against the property they own would be a very different public record from the one that exists, and it does not exist. That is why the bulk open data is restricted to corporate proprietors: companies do not have the same expectation of privacy, and there is a clear public interest in corporate landholding being visible.
The upshot is a genuine asymmetry: for companies, ownership is effectively public and searchable in both directions. For individuals, it is available property-by-property and not searchable by person at all.
How to run a company search using HM Land Registry data
The datasets
- CCOD — Commercial and Corporate Ownership Data. Titles held by UK-incorporated companies, LLPs, local authorities, housing associations and other corporate bodies.
- OCOD — Overseas Companies Ownership Data. The same for proprietors incorporated outside the UK, with a country-of-incorporation field.
Both are republished monthly under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Between them they cover the corporate-held registered titles in England and Wales, and each row links a title to its proprietor — including the company registration number, which is what makes reliable matching possible.
Doing it yourself
Entirely feasible, and the right answer for a one-off project. Expect to:
- Download the current CCOD and OCOD releases, accepting the licence terms.
- Load into a database. The files are too large for a spreadsheet.
- Normalise company numbers — upper-case, strip spaces, hyphens and parentheses, and preserve leading zeros. Zero-stripping is the classic cause of a false nil return.
- Normalise names for suffix and punctuation variants, or you will miss real holdings.
- Reshape wide to long. Up to four proprietors sit across repeated column groups; most questions are easier with one row per proprietor per title.
- Index for your query pattern — exact lookup on number, substring search on names and addresses.
- Align CCOD and OCOD, whose schemas are similar but not identical.
- Re-run monthly to stay current.
Our own pipeline is documented in the data methodology if you want a reference implementation to compare against.
Or query it directly
The alternative is to search data that has already been loaded, normalised and indexed — which is what this site does. Same source data, same licence, without the monthly pipeline.
Next step
Search HM Land Registry corporate data
Query indexed CCOD and OCOD records by company name, registration number, director or address.
Where the datasets stop and the register begins
This is the distinction that matters most for anyone relying on a result professionally. The datasets are an ownership index derived from the register. They are not the register, and they omit most of what the register contains:
- No charges or mortgages.
- No restrictions or notices.
- No covenants or easements.
- No boundaries — that is the title plan.
- No lease terms.
- No individual proprietors.
- No beneficial ownership — a nominee or SPV appears identically to an outright owner.
So the correct workflow is two-stage: use the datasets to identify which titles are relevant, then order official copies for the ones that matter. Screening with the data and escalating selectively is what keeps the £3-per-title cost proportionate — see CCOD vs the title register.
The other registers
HM Land Registry covers England and Wales only. For the rest of the UK:
- Scotland — Registers of Scotland maintains the Land Register of Scotland and the Register of Sasines, with its own search services and data products.
- Northern Ireland — Land and Property Services maintains the land registry there.
Neither is included in CCOD or OCOD, so a UK-wide question needs all three approached separately. A nil return from HM Land Registry data says nothing about Scottish or Northern Irish holdings.
Where to go next
- Company property search UK
- Free Land Registry search: what's free and what isn't
- CCOD data explained
- Find properties owned by a company
Frequently asked questions
Does HM Land Registry let you search by company name?
Not through its public title search, which is organised around properties rather than owners. HM Land Registry does however publish the corporate ownership datasets — CCOD and OCOD — in bulk, and those contain the registered proprietor for every corporate-held title. Searching by company name means querying those datasets rather than the title search service.
What is the official HM Land Registry company search service?
There isn't one in the sense people expect. HM Land Registry offers property-based search and per-title official copies, plus bulk open data including the corporate ownership datasets and a commercial data service for high-volume users. An owner-first interactive search is not among its public services.
Is searching HM Land Registry by company free?
The corporate ownership datasets are free to download under the Open Government Licence, so the underlying information is free. Making it searchable requires loading and normalising large monthly files. Official copies of individual title registers cost £3 each at the time of writing.
Does HM Land Registry cover the whole UK?
No. HM Land Registry covers England and Wales. Scotland is registered by Registers of Scotland and Northern Ireland by Land and Property Services, each with its own register, services and data products.