How to change your registered address when you’ve lost your Authentication Code

Your registered address for your company is your “official” address. It is where HMRC and Companies house will normally send their correspondence to. But what if you no longer have access to that address. It is quite common for people to register their address at their home, and then move house but forget to update Companies House.

If you have your Companies House Authentication Code it’s no big deal. You can go online and fill in the form AD01 online and the address is changed.

But what happens if you’ve lost the Companies House Authentication Code. The normal way to recover this code is to get Companies House to send it out to your registered address, but that is the reason you need to code in the first place.

In this situation, you have to go a bit old-school and send in a paper version of form AD01 to the following address:

The Registrar of Companies,
Companies House,
Crown Way,
Cardiff,
Wales,
CF14 3UZ

It normally takes a few weeks for the whole process to change. After that you can request that HMRC send out your Authentication Code, which takes another few weeks, at which point you have access to the company again.