A registered office is the statutory address a limited company must keep on the public Companies House register at all times. It is where legal documents can be served, where Companies House and HMRC write to the company, and it is searchable by anyone. For a property SPV holding buy-to-let stock, it is one of the very few pieces of the company that has to be a real place, because the company itself has no shop, no office and no staff.
That is what makes the decision awkward. Most landlords running a single-director SPV work from home, and the free option, using the home address, publishes that home address to the world alongside the company name. The alternative is a paid registered-office service that keeps the residential address off the register and handles the official mail. Neither is wrong, and the choice is a privacy and mail-handling judgement rather than a tax one. If you have not incorporated yet, our guide to setting up a property investment company covers the incorporation mechanics, and the wider structuring sits on the SPV company hub.
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What a registered office actually is, and what it is not
Section 86 of the Companies Act 2006 requires a company to have a registered office at all times, and since 4 March 2024 that address must be an appropriate address. The address is registered when the company is incorporated, published on the company's Companies House record, and reconfirmed on every annual confirmation statement.
Four separate addresses get confused with each other, and an SPV can end up with all four. They do different jobs:
| Address | Whose is it | Public? | What it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Registered office | The company | Yes | Statutory address for service of legal documents and Companies House post |
| Trading address | The company | No, unless you publish it | Where the business actually operates from. No filing requirement |
| Director's service address | Each director and PSC | Yes | The address at which that individual accepts documents about their role |
| Registered email address | The company | No | Companies House correspondence channel, required since 4 March 2024 |
The registered email address is worth isolating, because it arrived with the same reform package and gets read as a replacement for the postal address. It is not. It is a channel for the registrar to reach the company, it is not on the public record, and the company still needs a physical registered office. The wider set of changes that landed on the same date is covered in our note on the confirmation statement changes and PSC disclosure.
One thing a registered office is not is evidence of where the company operates. It carries no weight for tax residence, it does not have to be near the properties, and it does not have to be an address the company has any other connection with. A Manchester landlord can hold a Cardiff portfolio through a company with a registered office in London, provided the company is registered in England and Wales and the address is appropriate.
Can your registered office be your home address
Yes. A director's home is a perfectly valid registered office, and for a single-director SPV it is the default because it costs nothing and the post arrives where the director already is. The appropriate-address test is easy for a house or flat to pass: post delivered there reaches someone acting for the company, and delivery can be acknowledged.
The cost is publication. The registered office appears on the free public Companies House search, which means the residential address sits permanently next to the company name, is indexed by search engines and data resellers, and is visible to tenants, contractors, and anyone with a grievance about a property. Landlords underrate this until the first dispute. A tenant in arrears, an ex-tenant contesting a deposit, or a neighbour objecting to a licensing application can all find the director's front door in under a minute. There is no route to unpublish an address that has already been on the register, short of a Companies House application on protection grounds where there is a serious risk of violence or intimidation.
There is a second, narrower mechanism that landlords often miss. Every director and person with significant control also gives a service address, which is separately published. Using a business address as the service address keeps the residential address off the director record even where the company's registered office is somewhere else, and vice versa. The two are set independently. A landlord who wants a clean separation sets both: a service address for each director, and a registered office that is not the house. Setting only one leaves the home address visible on the other record.
The appropriate-address rule since 4 March 2024
The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 rewrote section 86 of the Companies Act 2006, and the change took effect on 4 March 2024 through the Companies (Registration etc) Regulations 2024. The registered office must now be an address where both of the following are true:
- a document addressed to the company and delivered there by hand or by post would be expected to come to the attention of a person acting on behalf of the company; and
- the delivery of documents there is capable of being recorded by obtaining an acknowledgement of delivery.
Read together, those two limbs require a real place with a person or process behind it. That is what removed PO boxes. A PO box has no one to receive a document and no way to acknowledge delivery, so a company cannot satisfy section 86 with a PO box alone. A large amount of competitor and blog content written before March 2024 still says PO boxes are acceptable, and some of it has never been updated. It is wrong. The distinction that matters is not whether the address is a box number but whether a person there can take delivery: a staffed mail-handling office qualifies, an unstaffed box does not.
Companies House was also given teeth. Where the registrar is satisfied that a registered office is not an appropriate address, the company can be moved to a default address held at Companies House, and a company sitting at a default address is exposed to strike-off action if it does not provide an appropriate address with evidence of a link to it. There are also fines for the company and its officers in default. For a property SPV, strike-off is not an abstract risk: a struck-off company's assets, including the properties, pass to the Crown as bona vacantia, and any mortgage lender will treat the default-address flag as an event long before it gets that far.
The same reform package abolished the old local registers of directors and PSCs that companies used to keep at the registered office, so there is no longer a set of statutory registers physically sitting at the address. Everything now lives on the central Companies House register. That removes one historic argument for keeping the registered office somewhere you can physically get to.
Home address versus a paid registered-office service
A registered-office service (sold variously as a registered-office address, a registered-office address service, or bundled into a virtual address for a limited company) is a provider supplying a business address that the company registers, plus handling of the post that arrives there. The better packages scan official mail the day it arrives; the cheapest forward government post only and bin the rest.
| Factor | Home address | Paid registered-office service |
|---|---|---|
| Privacy | Residential address becomes public at Companies House | Home address stays off the public register |
| Typical annual cost | Free | An annual fee, low relative to the SPV's other running costs |
| Mail handling | You receive everything directly, and you are responsible for opening it | Provider forwards or scans official mail, usually with a same-day or next-day service level |
| Suitable for | Single-director SPV where the director is comfortable with public visibility and reliably at home | Multi-director SPVs, privacy-conscious landlords, non-resident directors, anyone who moves house often |
| Appropriate-address compliance | Must still meet the acknowledgment-of-receipt test, which a normal home does | The service is designed around the test, but confirm the provider says so |
| Stability | Changes every time you move, and each move needs a filing | Fixed across house moves |
We do not rank providers and there is no such thing as a best one for every SPV. The questions that actually separate them are whether the price covers each director's service address as well as the company's registered office, whether general business post is handled or only statutory mail, and what happens to items they will not forward. If you are a non-resident director, ask specifically about international forwarding, because several providers scan for overseas clients rather than post.
The fee is a running cost of the company and belongs in your year-one budget alongside the incorporation fee and the confirmation statement, covered together with the rest of the year-one filing timeline in our SPV first-year accounts and filing timeline guide. Our SPV company formation cost guide carries the full year-one figures, including the Companies House fees themselves, so we are not restating them here.
One practical connection worth knowing before you choose: a mortgage lender or a bank opening the SPV's account will check the registered office as part of its know-your-customer process, and a mismatch between the address on the register, the address on the application and the address on the director's identity documents is a common cause of delay. Our guide to opening a bank account for an SPV covers what the bank checks. Whichever option you take, make it consistent everywhere before you apply.
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How to change your registered office address
A change of registered office is filed at Companies House on form AD01, online through the filing service or on paper. A director or an authorised filer can submit it, there is no fee, and the online route is processed far faster than the paper one. The new address must be in the same part of the UK as the company's registration: a company registered in England and Wales must keep its registered office in England or Wales, and a Scottish company must keep it in Scotland.
The timing trap is the one that catches people. The change takes effect when Companies House registers it, not when you file it. Until then, the old address remains the company's registered office, and a document delivered there is validly served on the company even if you have already moved out. That gap is when a court claim, a lender letter or an HMRC notice goes missing while the clock on it keeps running. If you are moving out of a home you are using as the registered office, arrange Royal Mail redirection over the changeover, and do not schedule the filing for the day you hand back the keys.
Two follow-ups after the filing registers. First, the registered office is reconfirmed on every confirmation statement, so the annual filing is the natural checkpoint for catching an address you changed in practice but never filed. Second, the register is not a broadcast: your lender, bank, insurer, letting agent and tenants all hold the address separately and none of them read Companies House. Update them directly.
Changing the address is one of a small family of post-formation Companies House filings an SPV makes. The company's SIC code is the other one landlords most often need to correct, and that is a different filing with different mechanics, covered separately in our SIC code for an SPV property company guide.
Non-UK-resident directors and the registered office
A UK company can have directors who live anywhere. What it cannot do is keep its registered office outside the country of incorporation, so an England-and-Wales company needs an English or Welsh address regardless of where its board sits. That is the whole reason the registered-office service market exists for overseas landlords.
The standard arrangement for a non-resident director is a UK registered-office service for the company, plus a UK service address for the individual, which keeps an overseas home address off the public director record as well. Neither substitutes for the director's own identity verification at Companies House, which is a personal obligation verified once and carried across every directorship and PSC interest that person holds, not repeated for each SPV.
Be clear about what the address does not do. A UK registered office does not make an overseas director UK resident, and it does not change where the company's profits are taxed. The company is UK tax resident because it is incorporated here. The address is administrative. If you are letting UK property while living abroad, the tax obligations that actually bite are the ones in our non-resident landlord scheme guide, not the registered office.
How to decide
For most single-property SPVs run by a director who is settled in their home and untroubled by the address being public, the home address is the honest answer and the free one. The case for paying flips on three triggers: the directors want their residential addresses off a public register, the company will hold enough property that tenant and contractor correspondence becomes real, or a director lives overseas. Any one of those, and the annual fee buys something specific rather than reassurance.
Whichever you pick, the compliance floor is the same. The address must satisfy the section 86 appropriate-address test, it must be in the right part of the UK, it must be filed on AD01 whenever it changes, and it must be reconfirmed annually. A PO box does not meet the test, and any provider or guide still telling you otherwise has not been updated since March 2024.
Sources
- Companies Act 2006, section 86 (registered office / appropriate address), legislation.gov.uk, verified 1 September 2026.
- Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, legislation.gov.uk.
- Changes to UK company law, Companies House campaign site.
- Companies House, gov.uk, for AD01 filing and company records.
- Set up a limited company, gov.uk.