A business is registered at my address. What can I do?

It happens more than you would think: a stranger's company on the public record with your home as its registered office. Why it happens, how to check, and the official Companies House route to get it removed.

Post arrives for a company you have never heard of. You search the public record, and there it is: someone's limited company with your home as its registered office. It is unsettling, it is more common than you would think, and there is an official route to fix it. Here is the whole picture.

Why a stranger's company ends up at your address

The mundane reasons come first: a typo in an incorporation form, a previous tenant or owner who registered a company there and never updated it after moving, or a formation agent recycling an address wrongly. At the commercial end of the same phenomenon, some service addresses lawfully host tens of thousands of companies; our profiles of the UK's busiest registered addresses show what that looks like at scale. The less mundane reason is deliberate misuse: an address chosen precisely because it is real and residential, to make a company look established or to keep the real operators at arm's length. Companies House historically checked very little of what was filed, which is how wrong addresses got onto the public record in the first place; its newer powers under the 2023 economic crime legislation have tightened identity checks, but the public record still carries plenty of history.

First, confirm what is actually registered

Search the company on the Companies House register and read its record: registered office, officers, incorporation date, filing history. The registered office is a legal service address, so a company registered at your home does not mean anyone works there or that you owe anything, but it does mean official mail and, in bad cases, debt-collection attention can arrive at your door. Keep any post you receive; do not bin it, it is evidence of the misuse.

The official fix: object to the registered office

Companies House has a formal process for exactly this situation: an application to change a company's disputed registered office address, form RP07. You apply, Companies House puts the company on notice, and if the company cannot show it is entitled to use the address, the registered office is changed to a default address held at Companies House itself. The company then has to provide a legitimate address or face compulsory strike-off. It is free, it works, and it does not require you to know or contact the people behind the company. If you suspect actual fraud beyond address misuse, report it to Action Fraud as well.

What you cannot do

You cannot demand a company's whole record be deleted from the public record: incorporation is a public legal act and the public record is the permanent public record of it, which is what the public record is for. The fix is correcting the address, not erasing the company.

One distinction worth knowing

Companies House is the official register; Leadistry is one of many services that build on its public data. Fixing the public record happens with Companies House through RP07 above, and that is the fix that matters, because every downstream service refreshes from the public record. If you also want a company's record out of Leadistry specifically, that is a separate, immediate thing: our remove a company form takes it out of our database permanently within seconds, no account needed. The two are independent: removing a company from Leadistry does not touch the official register, and correcting the public record flows into our data on its own.

If it is your own old address

The same RP07 route applies if a company you once ran, or once agreed to host, still lists an address you have left. And if you are a director whose personal details appear on records at that address, our guide to removing your own details covers the director-level options.