Data sources

Every field Rotuli returns comes from an official UK public source. This page lists each source, its licence and required attribution, and how fresh our copy is. The API's sources_checked and sources_failed fields tell you exactly which sources contributed to any given response.

Active sources

Companies House

Company profiles, officers and directors, persons with significant control, registered charges (security interests over company assets), and company search. Fetched live from the Companies House API and cached for up to 4 hours.

Registered charges cover a company's borrowing history: both outstanding and satisfied charges are returned, along with counts and whether a charge is a floating charge over the whole undertaking. Satisfied charges are kept rather than filtered out — they remain relevant to due diligence.

Every active director is additionally checked against Companies House's register of disqualified directors. Each checked director carries an explicit clear, disqualified, or unknown verdict, matched only on Companies House-asserted identifiers — never a name-based guess, so unknown is never reported as clear. These verdicts are retrieved from Companies House and cached alongside the officer data for up to 4 hours.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

The Insolvency Service

Corporate insolvency case records, retrieved via Companies House and cached for up to 4 hours.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

HM Land Registry — UK Companies that Own Property (CCOD)

Corporate ownership of registered land titles in England and Wales, including tenure and price paid where HM Land Registry recorded one. The dataset is refreshed monthly, when HM Land Registry publishes it. Scotland and Northern Ireland have separate registries that Rotuli does not currently cover.

Information produced by HM Land Registry © Crown copyright and database right 2026. Licensed for value-added use; this data must not be redistributed as a standalone dataset.

Freshness and caching

Each response slab carries its own {source}_fetched_at timestamp so you can inspect per-source staleness, and ?fresh=true forces a re-fetch.

Deliberate limitations

• Property addresses are postcode-only.Full property addresses in the CCOD dataset are processed against Royal Mail's PAF database, whose licence does not cover redistribution through an API like ours. Until that changes, the address field on land holdings contains a postcode or null.
• PSC dates of birth are never returned — or even retrieved. This is a data-minimisation choice, not an omission.
• price_paid is often null. It comes solely from HM Land Registry's Additional Price Paid Data where a price was captured at registration. Null means "no price recorded", not zero value.

Your obligations when republishing

If you republish data obtained through Rotuli, you must comply with the source licences yourself — including reproducing the Open Government Licence attribution statements above and the HM Land Registry copyright notice — and you must not imply endorsement by any government body. See the Terms of Service.