What a file from United Kingdom resolves to
The rows that are one company, the matches we would refuse, and the column that decides the rest.
The register, counted
Licence Open Government Licence v3.0. Storable, resellable and enforced on the write path rather than promised in a clause.
check a company on the register yourself →how this figure and every other one was measured →cite it: the five-register census, with a CSV →
A file of bare names cannot beat that census, whatever engine reads it. One sample tells you what your own columns do against it.
Start freeBaseline register, live-adjudicated. 5 things it gets right, 5 named gaps. Every figure comes from a fixture we built ourselves, and the method is on /accuracy.
every source and its licence →On this page
What works
One line per shape of file, each with the count it was measured over. Send the columns named here and this is what comes back.
- A record carrying a company number or an LEI: 100% (317/317) on the representative fixture, settled by exact identifier match before any model is called and without the record leaving the deployment.
- A name with a registered postcode: 98.74% (313/317). A name with a scrap of free text — a trading address, an email footer, a line from an invoice: 99.37% (315/317), 95% CI [97.7, 99.8].
- Cross-register safety that other jurisdictions do not get, because the GB registers and the number shapes each one issues are held as data. Charity Commission 209603 no longer merges with Companies House 00209603, and an OSCR charity number no longer merges with the Scottish company sharing its digits. Three of those collisions ship as hand-labelled non-matches in the test set, so the gate measures the benefit and not only the cost.
- Beneficial ownership at company level, cited to the company's own register page, under an open licence that permits storage and resale. It is UK-only and register-derived, and it is not a global ownership graph.
- Filed accounts as inline XBRL — the tagged machine-readable form filed alongside the human-readable accounts — on a separate switch from the company profile: average employees present on 90.3% of 18,894 measured filings, turnover on about 1%.
Those counts come off our own fixture. The one that decides your project is the same measurement run on your rows.
Start freeWhat it will not do
A limit found in week three of an integration costs more than a limit read here.
- 01
A company number that arrives without its leading zeros is ambiguous rather than merely untidy: 20,050 numbers in the 2026-08-01 snapshot strip to a value that is a real England and Wales charity number. Those rows abstain unless one other fact agrees across the pair, where a zero-padded file would have merged.
- 02
Truncated names are the weakest shape anywhere, including here: 58.10% (61/105). 44 of 105 come back as an abstention with a shortlist, which is the correct answer for a name whose missing tokens were the discriminating ones.
- 03
A name-only record that cannot be decided returns a ranked shortlist rather than a guess, and what the shortlist measures is whether the right company is somewhere on the list, not whether the top row is right. On the gated acquisition fixture, the true company was first for 74% (151/205) and inside the top three for 100% (205/205). Recall is a property of the list, not of the winner. 74% is far below the 0.90 acceptance floor, so no row of that shortlist may be offered as a match, quoted as an accuracy number, or folded into an accepted-match count.
- 04
Revenue from filed accounts, which is asked for constantly and is not available: only 2.13% of the register has to file a profit and loss account, and a full day of the Accounts Data Product yielded a machine-readable turnover on 0.91% of filings. The UK financials offer is therefore employees and total assets, with no promise of revenue attached.
- 05
The evidence is internal. The fixture is one we built from one register's published snapshot, and it is not a customer holdout and not independent third-party validation.
Internal fixtures only. The historical 2026-08-29 per-tier recording covers 317 GB companies with identifier-rich arrivals seeding the catalogue first; the context tier includes country and registered-town prose. Its legacy replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot certify current calibration. The September 5 CI reports cover 1,176 labelled pairs and 705 records over 250 companies using offline stubs. These are not independent customer holdouts or live production validation; the 99% minimum-input product target remains unmet. Scope is company and organisation identity only — not people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions or emissions. Results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy.
If one of those gaps decides your project, contact us before integrating. You can create your Free workspace online to inspect your own rows; an assisted first file can compare them with your incumbent’s matches and name the ones we would not have made.
Start freeUnited Kingdom, in detail
Registers differ more than engines do. These are the properties of this one that change what your file gets back.
Send a British file and it meets Companies House, the register every published tier rate on this site was recorded on. The baseline every other region is measured against. The recording was made on the 317-company representative fixture of 2026-08-29: 317 live GB companies sampled from the 2026-08-01 Companies House snapshot, with same-name siblings included. Identifier-rich arrivals seed the catalogue before the weaker input shapes are evaluated. Historical live adjudication recorded on 2026-08-29: 1,827 paid verdicts costing $53.53. The September 5 replay uses legacy recordings and has missing calls; it is not a new live measurement.
The register itself is why the numbers look the way they do. 99.53% of 5,464,811 live companies carry a name that is unique once case, punctuation and the legal-form suffix are stripped, which is why a British file arriving with names and nothing but a country still resolves at 98.42% (312/317). That rate was forecast at low-to-mid nineties and measured higher, because the collision-dense fixture it was first tested on had hidden how unique real company names are. The credit belongs to Companies House rather than to the engine, and that is why the French entry on this page reads so differently.
Companies House is also the deepest source in the inventory. It supplies the company profile, previous names, the registered office, register status, UK SIC 2007 codes, accounts and confirmation dates, and persons with significant control at company level — the last of which is the only beneficial-ownership data that ships anywhere in this product, and it ships for the United Kingdom only. Five personal fields the register volunteers on a person with significant control — date of birth, nationality, country of residence, name elements and address — are dropped at the ingestion boundary and never reach storage, held there by an offline test that fails if any of the five arrives. Corporate owners are kept: over the recorded log, 252 companies carried beneficial-ownership facts and 311 owners, 26 of them corporate, and every one of the 26 carried the full identification block that makes the next ownership hop resolvable.
Ask for UK financials and the register's own filing rules set the ceiling before any engineering does. Measured on the whole Free Company Data snapshot of 2026-08-01 — 5,695,465 companies, which is the entire file and therefore a wider count than the complete-row universe the parity census above is measured on: 32.57% file as micro-entities, 25.65% have filed no accounts, 23.49% file under total exemption, 11.22% are dormant, and only 2.13% must file a profit and loss account at all. Measured a second way, on a full day of the live Accounts Data Product, 172 of 18,894 filings carried a machine-readable turnover figure. Employee count and balance-sheet totals are the cheap parts of UK accounts; revenue is the impossible one.
where the census comes from
- Companies House register search
The register the baseline was measured on. The name-uniqueness figure is the register's own property, not the engine's.
The identifier columns a United Kingdom file arrives carrying
Most decisive first. Whether an agreeing value settles a pair on its own, or only narrows the field, is answered on the identifier's own page — along with what goes wrong with the column in a real file.
- IdentifierCompany numberA company number names a registration, not a company: 220 of 232 jurisdictions run more than one register, so it decides only once the register is named.
- IdentifierLEIOne LEI names one legal entity worldwide, and most companies hold none. An agreeing LEI settles a match with no model call, a conflicting one against.
The other registers we have measured
Four jurisdictions, each measured one register at a time. A map shaded in by region would say more and mean less: an adapter with no fixture behind it has no measured quality, and none is quoted for it.
United States
5 named gapsAt parity in part, with the failing factor named
France
5 named gapsAt parity, measured without model spend
Norway
4 named gapsAt parity, measured without model spend
If your file spans more than one of these registers, one sample tells you more than four pages will.
Start freeStart with a file from United Kingdom.
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Questions about United Kingdom
Which UK register does Entity Bind actually read?
Companies House, live, under the Open Government Licence v3.0 — the company profile, previous names, the registered office, register status, SIC codes, accounts and confirmation dates, and persons with significant control at company level. Filed accounts as inline XBRL sit on a separate switch, because they are a different host, a different rate-limit bucket and a payload two orders of magnitude larger. Four other GB registers are enumerated as data rather than read as sources — the Charity Commissions for England and Wales and for Northern Ireland, the Scottish charity regulator, and the FCA Mutuals Public Register — because knowing which register could have issued a number is what stops two of them colliding.
Why does a UK file resolve so well on names alone?
Because Companies House is an unusually unique register, and the credit belongs to the register. 99.53% of 5,464,811 live companies carry a name that is unique once case, punctuation and the legal-form suffix are stripped, so a name plus a country genuinely discriminates here in a way it does not everywhere — the same two columns in France meet a structural ceiling near 67.96%. On the representative fixture the name-and-country shape measured 98.42% (312/317). That number was forecast at low-to-mid nineties and came in higher: the earlier fixture behind the low forecast had been built to surface collisions rather than to be representative.
Do you hold data about UK company officers and owners?
Company-level beneficial ownership, yes, under the register's own open licence — and with five personal fields dropped at the ingestion boundary before anything is written: date of birth, nationality, country of residence, name elements and address. An offline test pins that drop, rather than a policy document. Officer and beneficial-owner names ship in an export only behind an explicit flag that is off by default, because the register's licence permits storing them and is silent on redistribution, so the choice to become a redistributor is the caller's and is made deliberately. Scope throughout is company and organisation identity: we do not resolve people.