Company Documents Apostille UK: Which Half of Your Corporate File Costs £90 and Which Costs £120

Which Company Documents Can Be Apostilled

Company and Companies House documents are one of the two largest categories of work on our order desk, and they behave unlike anything else we handle. A birth certificate is one piece of paper with one route and one price. A corporate instruction is a file — four, six, sometimes ten documents arriving together, produced by different people, carrying different signatures, and needing different treatment before the FCDO will touch them.

That is where the money is lost. The client sees ten documents and assumes ten identical jobs; the provider quotes ten identical jobs. In reality three or four could have gone straight to the Legalisation Office with nothing done to them, at £90 rather than £120 each — a difference of well over a hundred pounds for work nobody needed to do, invisible unless somebody sorts the bundle before quoting.

📋 What GOV.UK actually says can be legalised

The FCDO guidance sets out the categories plainly. The Legalisation Office can legalise a document issued by a UK court and sealed with a wet ink court seal; a document from a public registry, described as “a birth, marriage or death certificate, or a company certificate issued by Companies House”; a document from a government department signed by an official, such as a letter confirming tax registration; and a document from a registered doctor. It then adds the sentence governing everything else, including most of a corporate file: other documents can be legalised “as long as they have been certified by a UK ‘public official’, such as a UK notary or solicitor”.

Read those two provisions together and the whole article follows. A company certificate issued by Companies House sits in the same bracket as a birth certificate: a public registry document, apostilled as it stands. Everything your own company generated sits in the second: private paper needing a professional signature attached before there is anything to authenticate.

📄 The distinction that catches nearly everybody

Here is the trap that sends more corporate files back to us unusable than any other: the free PDF you download from the Companies House register cannot be apostilled. It looks exactly like the document you want — company number, incorporation date, Companies House crest — and it is completely unsigned.

Companies House states this in its own guidance, under a heading dedicated to the point: to get a Companies House document legalised by the FCDO, “it must have the original signature of a British public official”, and to get a document signed in person by one of its officials “you'll need to request a certified certificate or certified copy”. The free download and the ordered certificate are not two formats of the same thing. One is a printout; the other is an authenticated instrument, and only the second exists as far as the Legalisation Office is concerned.

💼 The documents a corporate instruction usually contains

Across the corporate files we handle the recurring cast is small. Certificate of incorporation. Certificate of good standing. Certificate of any change of name. Articles of association. A board resolution. A power of attorney appointing somebody locally. A PSC or shareholder register extract. Accounts, a bank reference, passport copies for the directors. Occasionally something unusual — we recently handled a vessel registry document for a yacht inside a corporate file, which follows the public-registry logic exactly. Some of those are registry documents and some are yours; section three sorts each into a column, and section two explains the rule, so you can classify a document we have never mentioned without calling anybody.

The Two Routes, and the Rule That Decides Them

There are exactly two routes through the UK stage of a corporate legalisation, plus a third stage bolted on for destinations outside the Apostille Convention. Nothing else exists, whatever a formation agent may have told you.

🔍 How to classify a document you have never seen before

Ask one question: who signed it, and does the FCDO hold that person's signature? A Registrar of Companies, a court officer, a General Register Office registrar or a named government official means Route A. A director, company secretary, accountant, bank manager or nobody at all means Route B. There is no third answer and no borderline case.

Getting this wrong costs money in both directions. A private document sent straight to the FCDO comes back unlegalised, costing you a fortnight. A Companies House certificate sent through a solicitor costs you £30 and produces a document with an unnecessary certification stapled to it that some overseas registries then query.

📑 What a solicitor certification actually does

On Route B the solicitor is not verifying that your board resolution is valid or that the meeting was quorate. They produce a certificate — a signed, dated statement attached to the document — and that certificate is what the apostille authenticates. Two consequences follow. The apostille is attached to the certificate, so nothing must be detached, re-stapled or photocopied afterwards. And because the professional's signature carries the document, some receiving authorities are specific about which professional: civil-law jurisdictions and several consulates want a notarial act rather than a solicitor's certificate. Ask before you order — a certification redone by a notary costs the whole fee twice.

Our power of attorney apostille guide covers the certify-then-apostille mechanism in more detail; a corporate power of attorney follows exactly the same rule as a personal one.

Document by Document: Route, Price and Handling

This is the table to send to whoever is assembling the file: every company document we are asked about with any regularity, the route it takes, our price, and what most often goes wrong with it.

Our prices include the FCDO fee, the certification where one is required, registered next-day submission and return delivery. Companies House ordering fees are separate and payable to Companies House. For the full price list see pricing, and for a breakdown of what drives apostille costs generally see our apostille cost guide.

The Certificate of Good Standing, Properly Explained

More people search for an apostilled certificate of good standing than for any other company document, and many are looking for something that does not exist under that name.

📄 What it actually is

Companies House does not sell a product called a “certificate of good standing”. What you order is a certificate with certified facts, and one of the optional facts is the summary statement: confirmation that the company has been in continuous, unbroken existence since its incorporation and that no action is currently being taken to strike it off the register. That sentence is the good standing. Everything the market calls a certificate of good standing, a certificate of existence or a certificate of no insolvency proceedings is, in the UK, this certificate with that statement on it.

Alongside it you can ask for other certified facts: the registered office address, directors' names and details such as date of birth or nationality, the secretaries, the company objects, and all previous company names. Which you include is worth a moment's thought, because the overseas registry or bank has usually specified them and a certificate missing one is a certificate you order again.

📦 How to order it, and what it costs

You order it from Companies House against your own company number, choosing the certified facts you want. The published fees are £22 standard and £65 same day, with additional certificates for the same company at £16. The standard service aims to dispatch within 10 working days; the same-day service dispatches that working day if ordered before 11am, and the next working day if after.

For anything with a real deadline, pay the £65. The difference is not £43 — it is £43 against up to two working weeks of your transaction sitting still. On a file where the apostille takes a day and the embassy takes a week, the Companies House standard service is very often the longest single stage in the project, and it is the one people economise on.

⏱️ How long a certificate of good standing stays acceptable

Here we have to be careful, because there is no single published answer and we would rather say so than invent one. The certificate itself does not expire — Companies House sets no validity period. What has a shelf life is the recipient's willingness to rely on it, and that is set by the receiving registry, bank or notary, not by anyone in the UK.

In practice the instructions our corporate clients bring us most often require the certificate to have been issued within the last three months, sometimes six. Gulf registries and banks tend to the shorter end; European registries are often more relaxed. Any guide stating a universal validity period for a UK certificate of good standing is telling you something it cannot support. Ask your recipient and get the answer in writing.

The practical consequence is the reason this section exists. A certificate ordered in January and apostilled in April, for a registry wanting it dated within three months, is dead on arrival — the clock runs from the Companies House issue date, not the apostille date. Order the certificate when the rest of the file is ready to move, not at the start of a project that takes a quarter to close. We have seen bundles re-run in full because the good standing certificate aged out while the local lawyers argued about the lease.

The Three Real Bundles: Subsidiary, Bank Account, Tender

Almost every corporate instruction we receive is one of three jobs. The documents and destinations differ, but the shape of the file is remarkably consistent. If you recognise yours here, you can assemble it in one pass instead of three.

🏢 Bundle one: opening a foreign subsidiary or branch

You are registering a company abroad that your UK entity owns, or the UK entity itself as a branch. The overseas registry needs to satisfy itself that the UK parent exists, is current, and has properly authorised the step. Almost everything here is registry paper, which makes it the cheapest of the three bundles per document.

Two points specific to this bundle. The power of attorney is the document most likely to be sent back, and almost always because of its wording rather than its legalisation — have the local lawyer approve the text before anyone signs it in London. And the documents must be apostilled individually: some consulates state that documents certified or apostilled as a bundle are not accepted. Never staple your file together and send it up as one job.

🏦 Bundle two: opening a corporate bank account abroad

Banks are the most demanding recipients of company documents and the least forgiving about dates. Their anti-money-laundering obligations mean they care far more about ownership and control than a registry does — and ownership is exactly what Companies House will not certify for you.

The PSC extract is where people lose time. It feels like a Companies House document — PSC information is filed there and visible on the public register — so the instinct is to order a certified copy. You cannot. Companies House will not issue certificates containing information on persons with significant control, shareholders, shareholdings or the statement of capital. The document has to come from your own statutory register, signed by a director or the company secretary and certified by a solicitor or notary. Budget £120 and a day, and do not discover the problem the week the bank wants the file.

📋 Bundle three: tendering or registering for business abroad

Government tenders, supplier registrations, agency and distributor appointments, free-zone trade licences. These vary more than the other two because the buyer writes the checklist, but the shape recurs: prove the company exists and is current, prove who runs it, prove it can afford the contract, prove someone is authorised to sign.

One warning specific to the Arab markets: genuinely commercial trade documents are not always an FCDO-and-embassy job. The UAE Embassy in London states that invoices are accepted only by the Arab British Chamber of Commerce, and the Chamber describes itself as providing the only Arab League endorsed certification for exports to Arab countries, covering certificates of origin, invoices and corporate papers. If your tender pack contains invoices, certificates of origin or shipping paperwork alongside the company documents, tell us when we quote — the chamber stage has to be planned into the sequence, not discovered halfway through.

The UAE and the Gulf: Why an Embassy Stage Is Added

The UAE is the single most common destination on our corporate order book, and corporate files skew towards it more heavily than personal ones. It is also where cost and timeline change most, because the UAE is not a Contracting Party to the 1961 Apostille Convention. An apostille alone will not be accepted there, however perfect it is.

📜 What the UAE Embassy in London actually requires

The embassy publishes the sequence in its own words, and it happens to state the central point of this whole article better than we could. Documents issued in the UK must be attested by the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office. The FCDO accepts original documents signed by UK Registrars — and the embassy's own list of those includes birth, death, marriage and company certificates. Other documents should first be authenticated by a solicitor or notarised by a notary public in the UK.

That is Route A and Route B, described by the receiving embassy rather than by us. It is worth quoting to anybody who tells you that every document in a UAE corporate file has to go through a solicitor.

The embassy also states that documents are accepted only by post, that postal submissions take up to five working days to process, and that its fee schedule distinguishes commercial company documents from individual certificates. It applies a transaction charge of 3 dirham plus 2% and notes that its fees are revised monthly — which matters when budgeting a large corporate file in advance, because the embassy's fees are not a number you can quote a client in March for a job running in June.

💰 What the embassy stage does to cost and timing

Take a seven-document subsidiary file. For a Convention destination — Spain, Germany, Poland, Viet Nam — that is four documents at £90 and three at £120, finished within days of the Companies House certificates arriving. For the UAE, every one of those seven also needs the embassy stage at from £150 each, plus the embassy's own per-document fee and up to five working days of processing. In round terms the same file roughly doubles in cost and gains one to two weeks.

That is a third government stage with its own queue, not a mark-up, and the only way to manage it is to plan for it. Two things help most. Do not send documents to the mission in dribs and drabs — assemble the complete file, because each trip costs you a full processing window. And order the Companies House certificates express at the start, because the embassy stage is what makes a slow start unrecoverable.

Our working in the UAE guide walks the full chain end to end with timings, and What Do I Need? will tell you which route your specific destination needs today.

How Many Copies, and How Fresh?

Two decisions taken at the start of a corporate file determine whether it runs once or twice. Both are about quantity and timing rather than legalisation, and both are routinely got wrong.

📋 Order more copies than you think you need

An apostille is a certificate attached to a specific piece of paper. It is not a status the document acquires and carries around; it is physical. One apostilled certificate of good standing can therefore be in one place at one time — and overseas registries, banks and notaries very often keep what you hand them, because the document goes on a file that has to be retained. So when a subsidiary incorporation and a bank account opening run in parallel, as they usually do, you need two apostilled sets of the core certificates. With a local lawyer involved as well, three is not extravagant.

One caveat: extra copies are cheap for registry documents and not for private ones. A second certified certificate from Companies House is £16; a second solicitor-certified board resolution is another £120, because the certification is a fresh professional act each time. Order registry certificates generously and private documents to the number you actually need — another reason to sort the bundle into two columns before anyone starts spending.

⏰ Freshness: the clock that runs against you

As section four explained, no UK company certificate carries an expiry date. What exists is the receiving institution's rule about how recently it must have been issued — we see three months specified most often, six months next, and no window at all in plenty of cases. It is set abroad and varies by institution as much as by country. The failure mode, though, is entirely predictable, and worth stating as a planning rule rather than a legal one.

The corollary: prepare the private documents early and leave the registry certificates until last. A board resolution does not go stale the way a good standing certificate does. Get the solicitor certifications done and the power of attorney wording agreed with the local lawyer, then hold the Companies House order until the rest of the file is a week from being sent.

Translation Comes After the Apostille, Never Before

The shortest section on the page and the one that saves the most re-work. The order is fixed: certify if needed, apostille, embassy if needed, then translate.

The reason is mechanical. The apostille is a certificate physically attached to the document and part of what the foreign official reads; a translation produced before it exists cannot cover it. Files get returned for exactly that — a beautifully translated set of company documents with an untranslated English-language certificate stapled to the front of each one. For a corporate file this costs more than for a single certificate, because translation is priced by volume and articles of association are long. Translating a full company set twice is a genuinely expensive mistake, and we see it several times a year.

Two further points specific to companies. Several jurisdictions require the translation to be produced in-country by a sworn or court-appointed translator, which makes translating in London a waste of money — ask the local lawyer first. And be consistent across the bundle: a translator working from several documents will render a name or address slightly differently on each unless told not to, and a registry comparing three variants of your registered office will query all three. Give the translator a glossary — exact company name, exact registered office, directors' names as they appear on their passports.

Our apostille and translation guide covers sworn versus certified translators and the country-by-country rules in full.

Ten Mistakes That Cost Corporate Files Weeks

Every one of these has cost a real client real time. None is about legalisation being difficult — they are all about the file being assembled in the wrong order.

If you are assembling a file now and are unsure about any document in it, send us the list. We will tell you which column each one falls into before anybody pays for anything.

Costs, Timelines & How We Handle a Corporate File

Plain numbers, including the ones that are not ours.

For reference, the FCDO's own published fees are £45 for a standard paper apostille — usually up to 25 working days plus courier or postage time — and £35 for an e-Apostille, up to 2 working days. Our prices include the FCDO fee, the certification where one is required, registered next-day submission and return delivery. Companies House fees are payable to Companies House and were checked against the published fee schedule on the verification date at the top of this page.

💻 Is an e-Apostille an option for company documents?

Sometimes, and it is worth asking about. The FCDO e-Apostille costs £35 and turns round in up to 2 working days, and its exclusion list — GRO certificates, ACRO and DBS certificates for England and Wales, disclosure certificates for Scotland and Northern Ireland, fingerprint certificates and ACCA membership certificates — contains no company documents at all.

The constraint is elsewhere. The service requires a PDF electronically signed by a UK notary or solicitor, so it fits the Route B documents in your bundle and not the Companies House certificates — those exist precisely because somebody signed paper by hand. The overseas recipient must also accept electronic apostilles, which rules it out for the UAE and the rest of the Gulf list, because embassies stamp paper. Where it works it works well: board resolutions and a power of attorney for a Convention destination can be certified and e-apostilled without anything physically travelling. Our e-Apostille versus paper guide covers the trade-offs.

The fastest route to a straight answer is to email the document list to info@legalisenow.com, call 0203 916 6250 or message +44 7494 434 224 on WhatsApp. What Do I Need? covers 127+ countries, pricing lists everything we do, and UK document legalisation explains the wider process.

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