What Does a Company Secretary Service Cost for a Freehold Company?

Worth being upfront about our position: we sell software that does part of this job, so we have a horse in this race. What follows is our honest read of when paying a person is the right answer anyway.

What you are actually buying

The genuine company secretary work for a building's company is not large. It is about five recurring items a year, most of them clustered around the confirmation statement. A paid human company secretary service — an accountant, a formation agent, a firm offering this as a standalone product — typically covers:

• Filing the confirmation statement each year
• Filing officer changes when you tell them about one
• Maintaining the register of members
• Acting as registered office, which is often the most valuable part of what you are paying for
• Fielding Companies House correspondence

Note the phrase "when you tell them about one". That is the crux of it, and it is why outsourcing disappoints people more often than it should.

Worth being explicit here: this is what a paid human service covers, not FreeholdMate. FreeholdMate is software, not a company secretary service, and it does not act as your registered office or accept post on your company's behalf. If a stable registered office address is what you need, that is a reason to use a service like the ones described above — see further down for what FreeholdMate itself actually does.

What stays your job regardless

• Noticing that something changed. Nobody outside your building knows a flat sold or a director moved away until somebody inside tells them.
• Making the decisions. A secretary service does not decide who joins the board.
• Signing. Directors still verify their identity, still hold personal codes, still approve filings.
• Everything about the building. Insurance, repairs, service charges, contractors. Not in scope, and a common misunderstanding.

So the realistic saving is the *doing*, not the *knowing* or the *deciding*. If your problem is that nobody in the building knows what a confirmation statement is, a service fixes that. If your problem is that nobody tells anybody anything, it will not.

When it is genuinely worth paying

• Nobody will take the role. Real, common, and not a moral failing. A vacant role in a building with nobody watching is worse than a fee.
• You need a stable registered office. If your building's directors turn over often, having the address point somewhere permanent removes the single most dangerous failure mode, which is warning letters going to a flat somebody moved out of.
• Something has gone wrong already. A company mid strike-off, or years of missed filings, is worth paying someone to unpick once.
• The building is large or complicated. More flats, more transfers, more of everything.

When it probably is not

• A stable four-flat building where one person is happy to do it. The work is a couple of hours a year. Nine out of ten named secretaries in the data we looked at were residents, not paid professionals, and those buildings are not falling over.
• When the real problem is single-person dependency. Paying an external secretary can deepen that, not fix it, because now one person talks to the agent and everyone else is even further from the information.

The honest comparison

The choice is not really "pay someone" versus "do nothing". It is: who is responsible, and does more than one person have visibility? Our data found that having a named secretary at all cut strike-off risk roughly sixfold, and that boards under strike-off notice averaged 1.82 directors against about three elsewhere. Neither of those findings is about whether you paid. They are about whether responsibility was clear and shared.

This is one part of our full guide to the company secretary of a share of freehold company, which covers the whole role end to end.