UK Company Record Keeping: What You Must Keep, Where, and For How Long

Record keeping is the compliance obligation nobody notices until something goes wrong — an HMRC compliance check, a due diligence request during a sale, a dispute over who owned what. It also changed materially in 2025 and 2026: four of the five statutory registers companies used to maintain were abolished, and the one that survived came with a new obligation for anyone who had been keeping it at Companies House. This guide sets out what you must hold now, where it has to sit, and how long each clock runs.

What changed: the statutory registers

Until recently a UK company was expected to maintain five statutory registers. Under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act reforms, four of them are gone. Companies no longer need to keep registers of:

• Directors
• Directors' residential addresses
• Secretaries
• People with significant control (PSCs)

The logic is that Companies House now holds this information centrally and verifies the identities behind it, so a duplicate copy in a folder at the registered office adds nothing. The corresponding option to keep those details on the central register instead of locally was withdrawn on 18 November 2025, and the equivalent option for members was withdrawn on 26 January 2026.

This does not mean the underlying obligations disappeared. You still have to notify Companies House of changes to your directors, secretaries and PSCs, and the PSC rules on identifying who ultimately controls the company are unchanged. Getting that identification wrong is still one of the more serious filing errors a company can make — HubPal has a rundown of the PSC register mistakes that put companies at risk of strike-off. What went away is the requirement to maintain your own parallel register.

The register of members you must still keep

The register of members — your shareholder register — survived, and it is the one most likely to catch people out. By law it must be held at your registered office address or your single alternative inspection location (SAIL), and it must be available for the public to view.

There is a specific trap here. If your company previously elected to keep its member information on the central register at Companies House, that option ended on 26 January 2026, and the obligation did not simply revert quietly. You must now create and maintain a full register of members yourself and hold it at your registered office or SAIL address. Companies that made that election years ago and forgot about it are the ones most likely to be non-compliant today without knowing it.

A proper register of members records each shareholder's name and address, the date they were entered in the register and the date they ceased to be a member, and the shares held — class, number, and amounts paid or agreed to be paid. If you have moved shares around, our guide to shares and shareholders covers what a transfer needs to look like before it reaches the register.

Accounting records

Separately from the registers, every company must keep accounting records sufficient to show and explain its transactions and to allow its accounts to be prepared. In practice that means:

• All money received and spent by the company
• Details of assets the company owns
• Debts the company owes and is owed
• Stock held at the end of the financial year, and the stocktaking behind that figure
• All goods bought and sold, and who they were bought from or sold to
• The supporting paperwork: receipts, invoices, bank statements, contracts, delivery notes

These are the records your statutory accounts and corporation tax return are built from. If they are incomplete, the problem does not surface at filing time — it surfaces if HMRC opens a compliance check and you cannot substantiate a figure.

How long to keep everything

Different obligations run different clocks, and they are not aligned. The safe approach for most small companies is to keep everything for the longest applicable period rather than trying to prune by category.

Record type	Retention period	Clock starts
Accounting records	6 years	End of the financial year they relate to
VAT records	6 years	End of the relevant VAT period
VAT records (One Stop Shop)	10 years	End of the relevant period
PAYE records	3 years	End of the tax year they relate to
Register of members	Ongoing	Maintained for the life of the company

Four situations require you to keep accounting records beyond six years:

• The records cover a transaction spanning more than one accounting period
• You bought equipment expected to last more than six years, such as machinery or vehicles
• You filed your return late, or HMRC has opened a compliance check into it
• You are in a dispute — commercial, employment or shareholder — where the records are evidence

Where records must be held

The register of members must be at your registered office or at a SAIL address you have notified to Companies House. A SAIL is simply a second address, formally registered, where inspection-eligible records are kept instead — useful if your registered office is a formation agent's address but your accountant holds the paperwork.

Accounting records have a lighter rule: they must be kept at the registered office or at another place the directors think fit, and be open to inspection by the company's officers. They do not have to be publicly available. If they are held outside the UK, accounts and returns must still be sent to a UK address and be available for inspection there.

For non-resident founders this is worth thinking through before it becomes urgent. A registered office that only forwards post is fine for correspondence, but a public inspection request for the register of members has to be answerable at that address within the statutory timeframe.

Keeping records digitally

Digital records are acceptable, and for VAT they are mandatory. Under Making Tax Digital certain VAT records must be kept digitally within functional compatible software — HMRC calls this the electronic account — and preserved that way for the full six years. A scanned invoice folder is not the same thing as a digital VAT record, and businesses that assume it is tend to discover the difference during an inspection.

For everything else, the test is practical rather than technical: records must be legible, complete and reproducible on request. Cloud bookkeeping satisfies this comfortably, provided you retain access after you switch providers — a surprisingly common gap when a company changes accountant mid-retention-period. HubPal's bookkeeping guide for international traders covers how to structure the underlying records so a handover does not break the audit trail. If your transaction volume comes from marketplaces rather than invoices, HubPal's guide to e-commerce accounting covers what marketplace settlement reports do and do not evidence.

What happens if you do not

HMRC can charge a penalty of up to £3,000 for failing to keep adequate accounting records, and directors can be disqualified. Failing to keep proper accounting records is also an offence under the Companies Act for which officers of the company are personally liable — one of the relatively few company law obligations that reaches the individual directly rather than the company.

There is also a quieter cost. Where records are missing, HMRC is entitled to estimate what you owe, and an estimate assembled without your evidence is rarely generous. The same applies commercially: incomplete registers and gaps in the paper trail are exactly what surfaces in due diligence, and they reduce what a buyer will pay or delay a sale while they are reconstructed.

If your records are currently a mess, the practical order is: reconstruct the register of members first because it is the one with a public inspection right attached, then bring the accounting records current for the open periods, then work backwards. Records for the current and immediately preceding year matter far more than perfect archaeology on year five. Record keeping also underpins the confirmation statement, which asks you to confirm the company information on the register is accurate — a confirmation that is difficult to give honestly if your own register does not exist. HubPal's guide to what actually changed in the confirmation statement is useful if you last filed one under the old annual return regime.

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