You apply to Companies House on form SR01 to have your home address hidden on the specific documents where it appears. It costs £34 per document, and since January 2025 it covers a home that was used as the company's registered office as well as one given as a correspondence address. Two limits apply: the address must stop being the current registered office before you apply, and suppression only changes the public register, so copies other websites have already taken stay where they are.
Where your address is likely to be showing
Most directors and people with significant control (PSCs) give Companies House two addresses: a usual residential address, which is kept off the public register and shared only with credit reference agencies and specified public bodies such as the police, and a service (correspondence) address, which is public. A home address usually ends up on the public record in one of three ways.
- You gave your home as your service address, so it is printed on your appointment form, confirmation statements and any change-of-details filings.
- The company was registered at your home, so your address is its registered office, past or present.
- Older filings, including forms filed under the Companies Act 1985, asked for a residential address and still show it in the filing history.
Search the company on the register and go through its filing history document by document. You will need the form type and registration date of each one for the application, and because each document is charged separately, a filing you miss now means applying again later.
Using form SR01
The SR01 application is for individuals. It can remove a home address, or part of one, as well as signatures, the day of your date of birth on older filings and your business occupation. You don't have to show you are at risk. That test belongs to the protection routes further down.
Before filling it in, deal with anything that keeps the address live. If your home is the company's current registered office, the company has to move its registered office first. Since March 2024 the registered office must be an "appropriate address" under section 86 of the Companies Act 2006, meaning post delivered there would be expected to reach someone acting for the company and delivery can be signed for, so a bare PO box will not do. Many small companies use an accountant's office or a registered office service. The same goes for a home used as the company's single alternative inspection location (SAIL), where it keeps its registers. Where you are still a director or PSC and your home is your current service address, the form asks for a replacement.
When listing documents for a former registered office, Companies House wants the original filing that first gave your home as the registered office, which might be the incorporation documents or an earlier change of address. Do not list the later filing that moved the office away from your home. The guidance on completing the form says an application that lists it will be rejected.
You pay through GOV.UK Pay first, then email the completed form with the payment reference, which Companies House describes as the quickest route. Paper applications with a cheque or postal order are still accepted but take longer. A missing payment reference or an underpayment means rejection.
Companies House does not publish a processing time for individual SR01 applications; the guidance says only that it depends on how many documents are involved. For a company that has been dissolved, you have to wait six months from dissolution before applying to suppress an address used as its registered office.
What the register shows afterwards
The address is not deleted from view altogether. Where you are no longer an officer, the company has been dissolved or the address was a former registered office, Companies House hides part of it: for a UK address, only the first half of the postcode stays visible. If you are still serving, your replacement service address takes its place. The removal can be reversed if the applicant is convicted of making a false statement.
If you are at risk because of the company
A separate set of protections exists for people at serious risk of violence or intimidation because of what the company does, or in some cases because of their personal circumstances when linked to it. Directors and LLP members can apply under section 243 of the Companies Act 2006, and PSCs under section 790ZF, to stop their home address being passed to credit reference agencies. A PSC can also apply to have all their PSC information withheld from the public register.
These applications cost £100, go by post on coloured paper forms that Companies House sends on request, and should come with evidence such as a police incident number. They take at least 30 days and can take up to a year, with the information protected while the application is considered. If an application is refused, there is a right of appeal to the High Court, or the Court of Session in Scotland. Protection cannot be given to a home address that is still the company's registered office.
What suppression does not change
The register is open data. Before your application went in, your address may already have been downloaded in bulk and republished by business directories, credit and company-check services and people-search sites. Those copies are untouched by an SR01, and each site has to be dealt with separately. Most have a removal or opt-out route, and where one does not, UK data protection law gives you a right to ask for your data to be erased. It is not an absolute right, and the organisation normally has one calendar month to reply.
Search engines are another step again. Google's "Results about you" tool lets you ask for results showing your home address to be removed, but Google says it won't remove results from pages owned by government institutions, so it is not a way round the register itself. Once a third-party site has taken your address down, Google may still show the old snippet for a while; our guide to getting Google to update a changed or deleted page covers that. A director with several companies, or a long filing history, can end up with the address on many sites; our page on cleaning up a digital footprint sets out how to work through them.