Identity verification became a legal requirement on 18 November 2025. The twelve-month transition closes on 18 November 2026 — but for most dental companies the date that actually binds is sooner, and it is not the one people are watching.
Article · 5 August 2026
If you hold shares in or direct a limited company — an associate's company, a practice company, a dental body corporate, or a dormant company you set up years ago and never closed — Companies House now has to confirm who you actually are before it will accept your filings. Identity verification became a legal requirement on 18 November 2025, and the twelve-month transition period that started on that date runs out on 18 November 2026. Companies House estimates that between 6 and 7 million individuals need to verify by then.
That November date is the one being circulated, and it is the wrong one to plan around. For a director, the obligation bites at your company's next confirmation statement. For a shareholding spouse who is not a director, it bites in a fourteen-day window built around their birthday. Neither of those is 18 November, and both can already have passed.
The rules split by role, and a single person can be caught by two of them at once:
New PSCs registered after 18 November 2025 provide the code when they are added to the register, or within fourteen days of being added.
Take a two-surgery practice held in a limited company, incorporated in 2016. Two dentist directors hold 60% and 40% of the ordinary shares between them; the principal's spouse holds no shares but is a director; and the confirmation statement date is 14 September. The figures and dates here are illustrative, but the shape is ordinary.
Failing to verify on time is an offence. Companies House can impose a financial penalty, or the matter can go to court for prosecution and a fine, and it can annotate the public register against your name. Persistent non-compliance can lead to director disqualification. Most immediately, an unverified director cannot make filings for the company or incorporate a new one.
For a dental business the second-order consequence is the serious one. A company that cannot file its confirmation statement is on a path towards strike-off, and the company is not an administrative shell — it is the entity that holds the NHS contract, the CQC registration, the lease and the bank facility. An unverified director is a five-minute problem that, left alone, becomes an existential one.
If your company carries on the business of dentistry, section 43 of the Dentists Act 1984 requires that a majority of its directors are registered dentists or registered dental care professionals. A body corporate that breaches this commits an offence.
That matters here because the obvious escape route is a bad one. If a director is dragging their feet on verification, resigning them looks like a tidy fix — until you count what is left. Resign one of two clinical directors on a board that also includes a non-clinical spouse or practice manager, and you have swapped a Companies House problem for a Dentists Act one. Verify the director; do not restructure the board around the paperwork.
One further change is coming: Companies House has said that from no earlier than November 2026 it will extend identity verification to people who file at Companies House. If your accountant files for you, that is their problem to solve rather than yours, but it is worth knowing the direction of travel.
Every year this regime adds a little more friction to holding a company: verification now, filing verification later, a public register that shows more about you than it used to. That is not a reason to unwind a company that earns its keep — but it is one more entry on the cost side of a comparison that has moved a long way against incorporation. We set out the current arithmetic in is a limited company still worth it for associates in 2026, and the underlying mechanics in our guide to limited companies for dental associates. If you are buying through a new company, the practice purchase guide covers where verification sits in the completion timetable.
We track confirmation statement dates and verification status for every incorporated client and prompt each director and PSC ahead of their own deadline. If nobody is doing that for you, have a conversation with us before November decides it for you.
Deadlines coming up, rule changes that affect dentists, and one number worth checking — once a month, no spam.
Yes, and twice over. You are the sole director, which means your personal code has to be supplied with the company's next confirmation statement, and you are almost certainly the person with significant control as well, which triggers a second fourteen-day window starting the day after the confirmation statement date. The size of the company is irrelevant — the obligation attaches to people, not to turnover, and a company with one director and no employees is treated exactly like a group with twelve. Verification itself is free through GOV.UK One Login and takes minutes with a passport or driving licence. The expensive part is only ever the filing you cannot make afterwards.
They almost certainly have a deadline of their own, and it is not the same as yours. Someone who holds more than 25% of the shares or voting rights is a person with significant control. If they are not also a director, their fourteen-day window runs from the first day of their month of birth as shown on the Companies House register — so a March birthday means 1 to 14 March, entirely disconnected from the company's confirmation statement. This is the single most missed deadline in the regime, because nothing else in the year points at it. Check the birth month on the register rather than working from the actual date of birth, since the register shows only month and year.
Not verifying on time is an offence. Companies House can issue a financial penalty or pursue prosecution through the courts, can annotate the public register against your name, and persistent non-compliance can result in director disqualification. In the meantime the practical block is immediate: an unverified director cannot make filings for the company or incorporate a new one, so the confirmation statement simply cannot go in. That is the part that escalates. A company that stops filing eventually attracts strike-off action, and for a dental practice the company is what holds the NHS contract, the CQC registration, the lease and the bank facility. Fix it early and it costs nothing but ten minutes.
No. You verify once, as a person, and receive a single eleven-character personal code that covers every appointment you hold now or take in future. What multiplies is not the verification but the deadlines: each company has its own confirmation statement date, so the same code has to be supplied at three different points in the year, plus any PSC windows that attach to you at each company. Keep the code somewhere you can find it, and give it to whoever files on your behalf — that is permitted. If you believe it has been shared more widely than you intended, Companies House will issue a replacement and cancel the old one.
Either route works. You can verify directly with Companies House through GOV.UK One Login, which is free and done online with photo identification, or you can be verified by an Authorised Corporate Service Provider — a regulated firm registered with Companies House to carry out identity checks — which may involve a fee. The ACSP route suits people who would rather hand over a document check than work through an app, and the personal code is emailed to you at the end of it. What no adviser can do is verify you without your involvement: the check is on you as an individual, so somebody has to look at your identity documents either way.
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