Company name rules checker

Three different questions, and people ask the wrong one

Is it taken? Free on gov.uk, one minute, needs the live register. Nothing on this site can do it, because nothing here talks to a server.

Is it the same as something taken? A different question with a different answer, and the one that catches people out.

Is it allowed at all? Sensitive words, permitted characters, the ending.

This page answers the second and third.

The same as test is not a string comparison

Before Companies House compares two names, it takes off:

• case, spaces and punctuation
• a leading the or www
• a trailing s
• the company type ending: Limited, Ltd, PLC, CIC, LLP, Cyfyngedig, Cyf
• location and generic endings: UK, GB, Great Britain, United Kingdom, Wales, Northern Ireland, com, co.uk, org, net, eu, biz, co, company and co

Worth noting what is not on that list, because it is repeated a lot in summaries of these rules: Holdings, Group, Services and International are not disregarded. They are part of your name and they do distinguish it. Words that get stripped and words that look generic are two different sets, and treating them as one produces a false clash.

Accents fold to their base letter, so Café is Cafe. Symbols become their words, so & is "and" and @ is "at". And only the first sixty characters are compared at all.

So "Acme Trading Ltd" and "Acme-Trading Limited" are the same name. Both reduce to acmetrading. So do "The Acme Trading Company UK Limited" and "Acme Trading".

Which is why your search proved nothing

You typed your name into the register and it came back empty, so you assumed it was free.

But you searched for the string you wrote. The test is run on what is left after all of the above comes off, and the company that clashes may be registered under something that looks nothing like yours to a human reading both.

The useful search is deliberately loose: look for your distinctive element on its own, without your ending, without your UK, without your Group. Then paste what you find into this page and let it tell you which of them count.

Sensitive words add a letter, they do not block a name

There are well over a hundred, and a lot of them are ordinary words a small business would reach for without thinking: bank, charity, institute, trust, association, federation, society, anything royal, and every nation name where a connection might be implied.

A sensitive word does not mean no. It means Companies House will not register the name until you have permission or supporting evidence from a named body, and this page tells you which body for each word it finds.

One is absolute rather than conditional: a company cannot be registered with trade union in its name at all.

Adding a word sometimes fixes a clash and sometimes does nothing

The instinct when a name is taken is to add something, and whether it works depends entirely on which word you reach for.

UK, Company, Co, com and co.uk do nothing. They are disregarded, so the comparison lands exactly where it did before and you have made your name longer without making it different.

Group, Holdings, Services and International do count. They are not on the disregarded list, so they distinguish a name. That is worth knowing precisely because so many summaries of these rules lump them in with UK and Company, and somebody reading that would abandon a perfectly usable name.

A different distinctive element is still the better answer, because it is also the thinking that produces a better name.

A green tick is not the end

Companies House can direct you to change the name up to twelve months after registration if it turns out to be too like an existing one.

And separately, a business with goodwill in a name can bring a case at the Company Names Tribunal years afterwards, which is a different test again and is about whether the name was adopted to take advantage of theirs.

Neither appears in the content formation agents publish about choosing a name, because that content exists to sell you an incorporation today.