Companies House Accounts Reforms

The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 included measures to reform how companies report information and what information they report when filing their annual accounts with Companies House.

The reforms include:

Requiring small companies and micro entities to file profit and loss accounts with Companies House as other companies do;

removing the option for companies to file abridged accounts;

a strengthened eligibility statement for all companies claiming an audit exemption;

the ability for the registrar to require all companies to file accounts via software—using inline extensible business reporting language (iXBRL) format; and

requiring component parts of the filed accounts and reports to all be filed together.

We also plan to bring forward secondary legislation to reduce the number of times a company can shorten its accounting reference period and introduce annotations to the register where a company has not complied with a notice regarding compliance of its accounts with the requirements of the Companies Act 2006.

ECCTA 2023 also included a requirement for small companies to file a directors’ report. However, as part of the Government’s modernising of corporate reporting programme, the Government announced that we will remove the requirement for any company to produce a directors’ report as part of their annual report and accounts. This change will therefore no longer apply.

The accounts reforms seek to improve the transparency, accuracy and reliability of data on the companies register, to inform business decisions, modernise practices in line with other countries, and tackle economic crime.

In June 2025, Companies House communicated that the reforms would be implemented in April 2027. This sparked some concern about the impact some of the reforms might have on businesses. As a result, we paused implementation to take time to engage with a range of stakeholders.

We have listened carefully to stakeholders’ concerns and after some consideration have taken the decision to proceed with the reforms, but with two changes.

First, we are proceeding with requiring small companies and micro-entities to file profit and loss accounts, but they will be able to opt out of having these published on the public register. We have taken this decision in response to concerns from the business and investment community around the commercial risks for smaller companies of disclosing this information, and the potential impact on investment opportunities.

Details of how smaller companies can opt out of publication will be confirmed in due course. Companies who wish to enjoy the benefits of publication, such as improved access to finance and enhanced transparency, can still do so.

Where a company opts out of publishing their profit and loss accounts, Companies House, law enforcement and His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs will still have access to identify and tackle fraud, economic crime and tax evasion.

Second, to give companies and software providers more time to prepare, we will postpone implementing these reforms by one year, from April 2027 to April 2028.

We will also proceed with mandating accounts filing in iXBRL format from April 2028. This will improve the quality of financial data for register users and provide more opportunities over time for companies’ accounts data to be aggregated, compared and subjected to analysis in different ways for use more widely.

We will continue to engage with stakeholders as we prepare the necessary secondary legislation and proceed to implement these important reforms.

[HCWS94]