Virtual offices and HMRC’s 2026 guidance, on one page.
HMRC’s July 2026 guidance makes clear that providing a registered office or business address is a trust or company service provider service, with the anti-money laundering duties that come with it.
Our free one-page checklist helps you see where you stand. Work through it with your team.
What the guidance says about your address.
HMRC published its anti-money laundering guidance for supervised businesses on 8 July 2026 and updated it on 13 October 2026. The guidance for trust or company service providers lists providing a registered office or business address as one of their services, and it names virtual offices directly.
Plenty of operators work with a partner who finds customers or carries out checks. If that’s you, the guidance on relying on someone else’s checks is clear:
“If you rely on a third party, you’ll remain responsible for any failure to apply due diligence measures appropriately.”
So start by checking who provides the address to each of your customers: your business, a partner, or both. The checklist begins there, then covers what to expect from a partner and the controls to have in place yourself.
Inside the checklist
- Your role: who provides the address, and whether you’re registered for AML supervision.
- If you rely on a partner for checks: the information and records you should be able to get, and how you record the reliance.
- Your own controls: your risk assessment, ongoing monitoring, post, warning signs and Companies House.
- 16 tick-boxes on one A4 page, based on HMRC’s guidance.
Free, and one page. Any line you can’t tick is worth looking at this month.
Based on HMRC’s guidance sections AMLG2500, AMLG3500 and AMLG11410. This checklist isn’t legal advice.