Quick summary
A confirmation statement (CS01) for a small share of freehold company is mostly a list of things you tick to confirm nothing has changed, plus a handful of fields where something usually has. Below is a worked example for a fictional four-flat building, field by field, followed by the two versions of it that catch people out: the year a flat gets sold, and the year a director quietly stops turning up.
Most guides tell you what a confirmation statement is. Fewer show you one. Since a lot of the anxiety around this filing comes from not knowing what it looks like until you are already halfway through it, here is a complete example, made up but realistic, for the kind of building this actually applies to.
Example one: the easy year
Chestnut Court (Freehold) Limited. Four flats, four members holding one £1 share each, three of the four owners on the board. Nothing has changed since last year. This is what the statement is confirming:
- Company number and name. Prefilled. Check the name matches exactly, including whether "Limited" is spelled out.
- Review period. The 12 months ending on the confirmation date, usually the anniversary of incorporation or of your last statement. You then have 14 days from that date to file.
- Registered office. Flat 3, Chestnut Court. Correct, because Flat 3's owner still lives there. This is the single field most worth staring at, because it is where every Companies House warning letter goes.
- Registered email address. A shared inbox the board actually reads, not one director's work address. Mandatory since the 2023 reforms.
- Officers. Three directors, no company secretary named. All three appear correctly, with correspondence addresses rather than home addresses.
- Director personal codes. All three directors have completed Companies House identity verification and their 11-character personal codes go on the statement.
- People with significant control. None. Four flats, one share each, so nobody holds more than 25%. "No PSCs" is a perfectly normal and correct answer for a building like this.
- Statement of capital. 4 ordinary shares of £1, total £4. Unchanged.
- Shareholders. The four flat owners, one share each, no transfers during the period.
- SIC code. 98000, residents property management. Prefilled from last year.
- Lawful purpose statement. A declaration that the company's intended future activities are lawful. A real declaration, not a formality.
Total time, if the records are already straight: about five minutes and £50.
Example two: the year a flat sold
Same building. Flat 2 changed hands in March. The statement now looks almost identical except in two places, and those two places are where it goes wrong.
- Shareholders must show the transfer: the outgoing owner's share moving to the new owner, with the transfer date.
- Officers may need to change too, because the seller was also a director, and selling the flat does not remove them from the board.
The trap is that people fold both of those into the confirmation statement itself. You cannot. A director resignation needs its own filing, the TM01, and the share transfer needs a stock transfer form (J30) and an updated member register before the statement goes anywhere near Companies House. The confirmation statement confirms what is already true. It is not the mechanism for making it true.
Example three: the year nobody noticed
Same building again, two years later. The Flat 3 owner has moved out. The registered office is still their old flat. One director has not completed identity verification. Nobody has filed anything for fourteen months.
This is not a confirmation statement example so much as the reason confirmation statement examples are useful. Everything in example one was five minutes of work. Skipped for long enough, the same five minutes becomes a Gazette notice and a strike-off, for a company whose only asset is the freehold everyone in the building depends on.
What to check against your own
- Pull up your company on Companies House and read the last confirmation statement filed. It is public, free, and it is the best example of your own statement you will find.
- Compare it to reality. Who lives where now, who is actually on the board, who owns which share.
- Fix the gaps with their own filings first, before you open the confirmation statement.
- Then file, with everyone's personal code to hand.
Our confirmation statement checklist is the longer version of that list.
For the year where the honest answer to every question is "no change", see nothing's changed, do you still file.
Frequently asked questions
Where can I see a real filled-in confirmation statement?
On the Companies House public register, free. Search any company, open its filing history, and open a previously filed confirmation statement. Your own company's last statement is the most useful example available to you, and it is the one worth checking against reality before you file the next one.
Is it normal to have no people with significant control?
Completely normal for a share of freehold building. If each flat holds one share and there are five or more flats, nobody clears the 25% threshold, so the correct answer is none. Buildings of three or four flats, or where one person owns two, are where a genuine PSC appears. More in our guide to who counts.
Can I change a director's details on the confirmation statement itself?
No. Appointments, resignations and address changes each need their own filing, made before the confirmation statement. The statement confirms the register is correct, it does not update it.
What if last year's statement was wrong?
File the corrections as their own filings now, then file this year's statement against the corrected record. A statement that confirms information you know to be wrong is a worse position than a late one.