Trade business names: how to pick one and check Companies House without regret

A joiner I know spent about £1,400 getting his name onto two vans, a set of hoodies, a pull-up banner and five thousand leaflets. Fourteen months later a letter arrived from a solicitor in Guildford acting for a firm with a registered trade mark on more or less the same name. He had a choice: argue it, or change it. He changed it. The vans went back to the signwriter, the leaflets went in the skip, and the Google listing he had spent a year climbing with reset itself back to somewhere around page three.

The name check that would have caught it takes about twenty minutes and costs nothing.

This is how to run it. What the law actually asks of you, the four searches to do before you commit, the words that get a name refused, and what a name is worth once it has been on the side of a van for a few years.

What the law actually requires (less than most people think)

If you are a sole trader, you do not register your business name with anyone. Not Companies House, not HMRC, not the council. You register yourself for Self Assessment with HMRC, and that is done under your own legal name. The trading name is just a name you use.

What you cannot do is hide behind it. Part 41 of the Companies Act 2006 covers business names, and the short version is this: if you trade under anything other than your own surname, you must disclose your own name and an address where documents can be served on you, and it has to appear on your business letters, order forms, invoices, receipts and your website.

So an invoice from Wójcik Plumbing needs a line on it saying something like:

Small thing, and easy to miss. It matters because if a customer ever needs to serve papers on you, the absence of that line can go against you in a dispute.

If you go limited, the rules tighten. The company name itself is registered and protected on the Companies House index, it must end in Limited or Ltd, and you must display the full registered name at your registered office, on your website, and on all your paperwork. Registering a company online costs £50 at Companies House, and the confirmation statement is £34 a year after that.

The four checks, in the order that saves you the most money

1. Companies House (five minutes, free)

Search the register at find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk. Type the name in. Then type it in again without the trade word, and again with common misspellings.

Two rules to know. The same as rule blocks names that are effectively identical once you strip out punctuation, the word "the", plurals, and characters that stand in for letters. Northgate Electrical Ltd and North Gate Electricals Ltd are the same name as far as the registrar is concerned. The too like rule is the one that bites later: for twelve months after your company is registered, an existing company can object, and Companies House can direct you to change the name.

Also worth doing while you are in there: search the name and look at what comes back dissolved. A dead company with the same name is usually fine, but if it went under owing people money in your area, you are buying its reputation along with the name.

2. The trade mark register (ten minutes, free)

This is the check that would have saved the joiner £1,400. Search the Intellectual Property Office database at gov.uk/search-for-trademark.

Trade marks are registered in classes, and the one you care about is class 37: building construction, repair and installation services. If you also sell goods, or do design work, class 35 and class 42 may be relevant. Search your name in class 37 first, then search it across all classes, because a strong mark in another class can still cause you problems if the name is distinctive.

What you are looking for is anything identical or confusingly similar with a live registration. If you find one, pick a different name. There is no version of this argument you win cheaply.

3. Domain and handles (five minutes, about £10)

Check the .co.uk is free, and buy it the same day you settle on the name. A .co.uk runs around £8 to £12 a year. Buy the .com too if it is cheap and free, mainly so nobody else parks on it.

Then check the name on Facebook and Instagram. You do not need to be active on either to want the handle. An empty page you own beats an active page owned by someone with the same name in a different county.

4. The plain Google search (five minutes, free)

The check everyone skips. Search the name on its own, then the name plus your town, then the name plus the surrounding towns. Search it on Checkatrade and on Facebook.

This finds the firms that do not appear on any register: the sole trader in the next town who has been trading under your name for eleven years, has 200 reviews and owns the local search results. Nothing legally stops you both using it. But you will spend the next five years having your leads phone him and his complaints land on you, and the first time either of you tries to rank, you split the same search traffic.

The words you cannot use

Some words are blocked outright and some need permission from Companies House or a named body. The full list is on gov.uk under sensitive words and expressions, and it applies to company names and, in a slightly softer form, to sole trader trading names too.

The ones that come up constantly in the trade:

• Limited, Ltd, LLP, plc. Companies only. Using them as a sole trader is an offence and it misleads the customer about who they are actually contracting with.
• British, National, International, European, United Kingdom, England, Scotland, Wales. All need justification. You will be asked to show why the name is not misleading about your size or reach.
• Registered, Accredited, Approved, Authorised, Chartered, Licensed. These imply a body has signed you off. If none has, you are into misleading commercial practice territory as well as naming rules. "Registered Electrical" is asking for trouble unless you can name the register.
• Institute, Association, Federation, Society, Council, Board, Trust, Group, Holdings. Sensitive. Group and Holdings in particular get refused for a one-van outfit with no subsidiaries.
• Anything suggesting a link to government, a local authority, the Royal family, or a regulator. Royal, Crown, King's, Her Majesty's, and anything that reads like a council department.

Separate from all of that: do not use a scheme's name in your business name. NICEIC, Gas Safe, MCS, TrustMark and the rest are protected marks. You can say you are registered with them, on your van and your website, once you actually are. You cannot call the firm Gas Safe Heating Ltd.

What a name is actually worth: the rebrand maths

The reason to spend twenty minutes now is that the cost of a forced change is not the signwriter's bill. It is the search visibility.

Take a two-van firm, Adam Wójcik trading as Wójcik Plumbing, three years in, turning over about £190,000. Say a trade mark holder makes contact and the name has to go. Here is the actual bill:

• Cut vinyl lettering redone, two vans at £280 each: £560
• New signage board for the yard: £150
• Workwear re-embroidered, four sets at £30: £120
• 5,000 leaflets binned and reprinted: £180
• Domain, email migration, new stationery and invoice templates: £90
• Solicitor's letter to close the matter down properly: £300
• Direct cost: £1,400

Then the part nobody budgets for. The Google Business Profile name change triggers re-verification and, in practice, a wobble in local rankings for somewhere between four and twelve weeks. Say the profile was bringing in 14 enquiries a month, a third of them converting, at an average job value of £900. Lose half of that for two months and you are down roughly:

• 7 lost enquiries per month × 2 months = 14 enquiries
• 14 × 33% conversion = about 4.6 jobs
• 4.6 × £900 = £4,140 of work that did not come in

Total damage: around £5,500, plus the 200 reviews attached to a name nobody searches for any more. Against twenty minutes of free searching before the first van was ever lettered. There is no two ways about it, the search is worth doing.

What makes a name that still works in year five

Beyond the legal checks, three practical tests.

Can you spell it down the phone from a loft? If every customer needs it spelling out, you lose a percentage of them at the point they try to find you again. Surnames are usually fine, even awkward ones, because customers expect to be told how to spell a surname. Invented words are not.

Does it survive you adding a trade? Halton Boiler Repairs is a fine name right up until you start doing full heating installs and bathrooms. Halton Plumbing and Heating carries further. Halton Property Services carries further still but says less. Name for what you will be doing in five years, not what you did last week.

Does it work with a town attached? Most of your searches will be "electrician Halifax" not your name. The name that does best is the one that reads naturally in "Wójcik Plumbing, Halifax", appears that way on your Google Business Profile, and matches on Checkatrade, the van and the website letter for letter. Consistency across those four is worth more to local ranking than cleverness in the name itself.

What NOT to do

1. Do not letter the van before you have run the four checks. This is the whole article in one line. Signage is the point of no return, because it is the first thing that costs real money and the first thing people photograph.
2. Do not assume Companies House is the only check. It only covers registered companies. The trade mark register and a plain Google search catch the two problems Companies House will never show you.
3. Do not use Ltd, Registered, Accredited, or a scheme name to sound bigger than you are. Customers who check will find out, and they will assume everything else on the quote was inflated too. Trust that the work sells itself.
4. Do not name the firm after one trade if you plan to add others. Rebranding for growth costs the same as rebranding for a solicitor's letter, and it is entirely avoidable at the naming stage.
5. Do not let the name drift across your listings. Wójcik Plumbing on the van, W Wójcik Plumbing & Heating on Checkatrade, and Wojcik Plumbing on Google is three businesses as far as search is concerned. Pick the exact string, including the accents and the ampersand, and use it everywhere without variation.

If you have already got the wrong name

Only change it if one of three things is true. Someone with a registered mark or established goodwill has been in touch and their claim looks solid. Or the name is costing you work, because customers cannot spell it or it describes a trade you have stopped doing. Or you are going limited anyway and this is the natural moment.

If none of those apply, leave it. A slightly awkward name with three years of reviews behind it beats a perfect name with none. And if you do change, do it in one go across every listing on the same day, keep the old domain redirecting to the new one, and put a line on the website saying the firm was formerly trading as the old name. Google and your customers both need the bridge.

The twenty-minute version

Write down three candidate names. For each one, in this order: Companies House search, IPO class 37 search, domain availability, Google plus your town, Checkatrade, Facebook. Cross off anything with a live trade mark or an established local firm on it. Of what survives, pick the one you can spell down a phone line and that still makes sense in five years.

Then buy the domain, claim the Google Business Profile, letter the van, and put the disclosure line in your invoice footer so it is on every document from job one. That last bit takes thirty seconds if your invoicing lets you set a default footer once, and eats an evening if you retype it every time.