Professional limited company formation agents electronically filing directly with Companies House.

The Company Name

Before incorporating your company you will need to choose a name. The name chosen must not be identical or the ‘same as’ another name appearing on the index of company names, even if this name is already being used as the name of a sole trader or partnership.

Once you are on the on-line form you will be asked to provide your proposed company name, in a nutshell it must be unique and contain the word ‘Limited’ or the short form ‘Ltd’ at the end.

The name must not be offensive. There are some words or expressions you cannot freely use, which may require permission from certain third parties to use them, such as doctor, dentist or architect.

Words such as group, holdings or international may require certain undertakings to be made before Companies House will approve the name.

You will need the Secretary of State’s prior approval, if your chosen name:

• suggests a connection with Her Majesty’s Government or a devolved administration or a local authority or a specified public authority
• contains a sensitive word or expression

Also a name is the ’same as’ another name appearing on the index of company names if it is either identical to an existing name or would be deemed to be essentially the same because the name differs only by minor elements which the law requires us to disregard when comparing the two names. For example, Companies House would disregard plurals or certain types of punctuation marks when comparing names.

Examples of what will be disregard or ignored when comparing names are:

• words and expressions such as “biz”, “co”, co uk”, “co.uk”, “com”, “company”, “UK”, “United Kingdom”, “Wales”, “Cymru”, “net”, ”GB”, “Great Britain”, “org.uk”, “services”, “international
• a blank space between or after a word, expression, character, sign or symbol;
• punctuation including a full stop, comma, colon, semi colon, hyphen, apostrophe, bracket, exclamation mark, question mark;
• “s” at the end of a name;
• “the” and “www” at the beginning of a name;