Disputes about company addresses and company mail

What are a company’s obligations?

The law requires a company to notify ASIC of any changes to:

• its registered office or principal place of business address
• the personal details (including usual residential address) of directors, alternate directors or company secretaries
• the addresses of the top 20 members of each share class of a proprietary company (whether they are an individual or a company).

A company is in breach of its obligations if it fails to notify ASIC of any of these address changes within 28 days of the change. To update your details, submit a Change to company details online.

Please note that ASIC’s corporate register is a record of notifications made to us about company details by the companies themselves. We do not have the power to determine whether these notifications are accurate or appropriate, and we are not able to change our corporate register except in very specific circumstances under the Corporations legislation, or with a court order.

How will I know if a company has updated its addresses?

We have a free Company Alert service that allows you to monitor the publicly available forms any company has lodged with ASIC (including changes of addresses).

After you create a Company Alert profile and nominate companies to monitor, you will receive an email if documents are lodged by the companies you have nominated.

Learn more and create a Company Alert profile.

What you should do

If you are trying to locate a company that you have had dealings with, but the contact details you have are incorrect

If you haven’t already, you should search our public register to find the company’s registered office and other important details.

If you are seeking to serve a legal document for the purposes of any Australian law, you can do this by:

• leaving it at or posting it to the company’s registered office, or
• delivering a copy of the document personally to a director of the company who resides in Australia.

Even if the company is no longer at the registered office address, the law will still deem the service effective as long as the document is properly addressed, prepaid and posted as a letter. However, in these circumstances, it may be prudent to also serve the document personally on the company director.

For further information about how to effectively serve legal documents, we recommend you take the time to seek independent legal advice. If you are unsure how to access legal advice, contact the Law Society in your state or territory.

If you are receiving mail addressed to a company or its director(s) or you are an agent and no longer give permission for a company to use your address

You may receive mail from ASIC addressed to a company or officeholder if they operated at that address before and failed to tell us when their address changed.

In these cases, you can notify us by completing our online enquiry form. Be sure to include:

• the name of the company that the mail is addressed to
• the company's Australian Company Number (ACN)
• the address the mail is being sent to

ASIC and reports from occupants and registered agents receiving misdirected company mail

When we are contacted by a registered agent who is receiving company mail and the agent no longer gives (or never gave) permission for that company to use their address, we aim to contact the company’s officers to alert them to the breach and give them the opportunity to rectify the problem. If the company’s officers do not notify us of the company’s new registered office address, we may change the address on the register to that of the director.

Where an occupant contacts us about misdirected company mail, we can put a notation against the company’s or officeholder’s address on our register, stating that mail we have sent to that address has been returned or that we have received information that the address may be invalid. Even though we cannot change the register, we will not send further mail to an address after we have made such a notation.

Where can I get more information?

• For information about ASIC's role and the laws we manage.
• To register a Company Alert.

Important notice

Please note that this information sheet is a summary giving you basic information about a particular topic. It does not cover the whole of the relevant law regarding that topic, and it is not a substitute for professional advice. We encourage you to seek your own professional advice to find out how the applicable laws apply to you, as it is your responsibility to determine your obligations.

You should also note that because this information sheet avoids legal language wherever possible, it might include some generalisations about the application of the law. Some provisions of the law referred to have exceptions or important qualifications. In most cases, your particular circumstances must be taken into account when determining how the law applies to you.