Directors' home addresses are coming off the public register

For more than three decades, anyone with an internet connection and a company name has been able to find out where a New Zealand director sleeps at night. That is about to change. The Companies (Address Information) Amendment Act 2025 received the Royal assent on 18 November 2025 and will allow directors to keep their residential address off the public face of the Companies Register, substituting an alternative address instead. I think the reform is overdue and I support it. I also want to be candid about something we see from the insolvency side of the fence, because a director's registered address is not always changed for the reasons people assume.

What the reform actually does

The Act does not abolish the requirement to give the Registrar a residential address. It separates two things that have always been bundled together: the information the Registrar holds, and the information the public can see.

Once the regime is live, a director may apply to the Registrar of Companies to have their residential address withheld from public view and replaced on the register by an alternative address. The genuine residential address is still filed, and the Companies Office continues to hold it internally, including for enforcement purposes. What changes is the shopfront. The Registrar must take reasonable steps to prevent public access to the residential address, and that extends to redacting it from documents already sitting on the register, so a suppressed address should not simply reappear in an old annual return or consent form.

The threshold, and how to meet it

An application must be supported by a statutory declaration made before an authorised witness, such as a Justice of the Peace or a solicitor, confirming that public access to the residential address is likely to result in physical or mental harm. Encouragingly, MBIE has indicated that the declaration does not need to set out the detail of the applicant's circumstances, which spares people from having to publish an account of the very situation they are trying to protect themselves from.

That said, this is not a general privacy opt-out. The wording points to a real risk of harm rather than a preference not to be found, and a statutory declaration is a formal document with real consequences if it is untrue. Directors should approach it accordingly.

One application can cover a person's directorships across several companies, so a director sitting on a group of entities does not need to repeat the exercise for each one. The relief is not, however, retrospective in the sense some people hope for: former directors, and directors of companies that have already been removed from the register, are not able to apply.

Choosing the alternative address

The substitute address is not a formality. It must be a physical address at which documents can genuinely be served, because the register still has to function as a means of reaching a director when something goes wrong.

Two practical points follow. First, if you intend to use your adviser's address, ask them first, and confirm they have a system for passing on anything that arrives. A statutory demand or a liquidation application delivered to a firm's mailroom and left to sit is a serious problem. Second, if you later resign or are removed as a director, the alternative address does not disappear by itself. It stays on the record until you ask for it to be taken down.

The reform is also aimed squarely at directors. It does not extend generally to shareholders, although there is limited scope where a shareholder is also a director, or where someone living at a director's address consents to that address being used.

Why I support the change

Insolvency work puts you in the room at the moment when money has been lost and feelings are running hot. Over the years I have seen directors and their families receive abuse, unannounced visits at home and sustained online attention, sometimes long after the company itself has gone. I have had one of my team on field surveillance having two of their tyres with the air let out, and another with a cracked windscreen with a note on the wipers “I know where you live” in a G17 classified matter that involved an eviction after co-ordination with Police and stakeholders. Their addresses were discoverable as company directors in other unrelated companies. The people who suffer that are not always the ones who caused the loss, and they very often include partners, children and flatmates who never had anything to do with the business at all.

The Companies Register exists so that the public can identify who stands behind a company and so that documents can reach those people. It was never intended to be a national directory of where directors live. Separating accountability from exposure is the right call, and it aligns New Zealand with jurisdictions that made the same move years ago. If the cost of taking on a directorship is publishing your home address, some capable people will simply decline to serve, and closely held New Zealand businesses cannot afford that.

Just as importantly, the design of this reform is sound. The Registrar still receives the real address. Suppression is a curtain, not a vanishing act, and that distinction is what makes the reform workable for those of us who have to find people for a living.

A pattern worth naming

Here is the observation I would ask directors and their advisers to sit with. In our work, we not infrequently see a director's registered address change in the weeks or months immediately before a company goes into liquidation. It is a pattern, and it is worth understanding rather than assuming.

Some of those changes are entirely innocent. People move house. Relationships end. A director who relocated two years ago finally tidies the record when the accountant reviews the file, and the timing simply coincides with the company's decline. Some are the very thing this legislation is designed to address: a director who can see a public failure coming, who knows the creditors are local, and who is genuinely worried about their family's safety.

But there is another driver, and it would be dishonest not to mention it. Credit reporting agencies build their files on individuals using identifiers that include name, date of birth and address, and a residential address is one of the threads that ties a person to a company's history and to adverse data. Changing an address shortly before a failure can loosen that thread, and it can affect what surfaces on a future credit enquiry, including for other people who remain at the old address. Whether or not that is the intention in any given case, it is the effect, and it is something directors are sometimes advised about.

I am not suggesting that most address changes before an insolvency are improper. They are not. But when a liquidator reviews a company's filing history and sees an address changed shortly before appointment, it is a fact to be noted and understood, alongside the transfer of assets, the change of trading name and the incorporation of a similarly named new entity. Directors should expect the question to be asked.

What suppression does not do

It is important that nobody applies for this protection under a misapprehension about its reach.

• It does not defeat a liquidator's information powers. Once a company is in liquidation, a liquidator's ability to require documents and information from directors under the Companies Act 1993 is unaffected. Residential addresses also appear in company records, bank statements, tax records and lease documents, and the Registrar retains the genuine address.
• It does not retrieve what is already out there. The register has been scraped and republished for years. Credit bureaus, data aggregators, search sites and media archives already hold historic address data, and nothing in this Act reaches into their systems.
• It does not cover past directorships. Records of companies already removed from the register, and of directorships already ended, are outside the regime.
• It does not change any duty. A director's obligations under sections 131 to 137 of the Companies Act 1993 are exactly what they were. Our for directors page sets out the ground rules, and we look at the creditor dimension in what directors owe creditors.

For creditors and advisers

If you extend credit or take personal guarantees, this is a prompt to stop treating the Companies Register as your source for a director's home address. From the date the regime commences, that address may lawfully be a lawyer's office in another city.

The fix is unglamorous and effective: capture the residential address yourself, at the point you grant credit, in the credit application and in the guarantee itself, and include an agreed address for service in your terms of trade. Register your security interests on the PPSR. If a guarantee is worth taking, it is worth being able to serve on it. Advisers reviewing client terms of trade this year should add this to the list, and our for creditors and for advisers pages explain how we assist. Where a debt has already gone bad, our plain-English guide to statutory demands sets out the timeframes.

Where this leaves us

Directors carry real personal risk in New Zealand, and a good deal of it is not financial. Allowing someone to serve on a board without publishing their front door to the world is a sensible, humane reform, and I am pleased to see it. It is also, properly understood, no obstacle to the work of a liquidator, because the information that matters is still being filed.

The two things go together. Directors who apply for the protection for the right reasons will get it and should. Directors who are thinking about their address in the shadow of a failing company would be far better served having a confidential conversation about the company itself, while options such as a creditors compromise, voluntary administration or a planned turnaround remain open. That conversation costs nothing to arrange. Get in touch and we will tell you honestly where you stand.

This article is general commentary only and does not constitute legal, taxation or insolvency advice. The regime described has not yet commenced and the final application requirements are subject to the regulations and forms to be published by MBIE. Specific advice should be obtained from a qualified adviser in respect of your particular circumstances.

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