I sat down to file my company’s corporation tax return this year and the service I’d always used had gone. Not moved, not redesigned — closed. The joint HMRC and Companies House portal, the free one that took your accounts and your CT600 together, shut for good on the 31st of March. From the 1st of April, HMRC only accepts a company tax return filed through commercial software you pay for.
Nobody wrote to tell me. I found out the way you find out about these things: by turning up to do the job and finding the door locked.
The replacement isn’t ruinous. Recognised software for a straightforward micro-entity runs from about £30 a return at the cheap end to £100-plus for a package that prepares the accounts and the tax return together. I paid, I filed, it went through. But it’s a cost that didn’t exist a year ago, on a job that used to be free, and it lands hardest on the companies least able to absorb it.
While that door was closing, the standing charges crept up behind it. The confirmation statement — the annual filing that tells Companies House nothing has changed, or lists what has — was £13 for years. It went to £34 in May 2024, and to £50 this February. That’s a fee which nearly quadrupled in under two years, on a filing every company owes whether it traded or not.
Add it up and a small limited company now pays somewhere between £80 and £150 a year in unavoidable fees and software just to stay on the register, before it earns a single pound.
The stated reason for all of it is fraud, and half of it genuinely goes at fraud. Anonymous directors and burner companies are a real problem, and proving a director is a real person is a reasonable thing to ask. But the software half is a different animal, because a fraudster running a company to move money pays £143 for filing software without blinking — it’s a rounding error against what they’re shifting. The person who actually feels it is the retired one-person consultancy, the dormant company someone keeps for the name, the side-project limited that turns over a few hundred a year. They used the free service because free was the entire point.
A price on the door doesn’t keep the dishonest out. It keeps out the ones who were only just managing to stay in.
Now the part with a date on it, which is why I’m writing this in July rather than saving it for the autumn. Every company director, and every person with significant control, has to verify their identity with Companies House. Newly appointed directors have had to since the 18th of November last year. Every existing director has until the 18th of November this year — under four months from now — through GOV.UK One Login or an authorised agent.
It’s free, it takes about twenty minutes and a photo ID, and it’s over with. It’s also the only item on this list that turns into a real problem if you leave it, because missing the deadline is an offence and it can block you from filing at all. If you do one thing after reading this, do that one, and do it while it’s still a twenty-minute job rather than a November scramble.
I’ve written the whole thing up properly — what closed, what each piece costs now, the cheapest compliant route through it for a simple company, and the profit-and-loss reform that was coming in 2027 and got paused in January: what it now costs to keep a limited company alive. Its other half is what my accountant never mentioned, which covers the legitimate allowances a few-hours-a-year fee never goes hunting for. Both of them come out of filing my own returns, this year, through every one of these changes as they landed.
It’s the same instinct behind the real cost of building a website — answer the money question with a number, instead of saying it depends and hoping you stop asking.
None of this needs an accountant if your company is genuinely simple. A dormant or micro one-person limited can verify its director, file its own confirmation statement, and put a CT600 through recognised software for well under £150 all in, in an afternoon a year. Where an accountant earns their fee is the moment there’s a judgement in it — how something’s treated, what’s allowable, a position that could honestly go either way. That’s real expertise and it’s worth paying for. What changed isn’t that. It’s that the free door for the simplest job closed, and the price of being a small company went up whether you use an accountant or not.
So: verify your identity this week. It’s free, it’s twenty minutes, and it’s the one with the clock on it.
