An FCA application asks for your firm's principal place of business — the place from which the business is actually directed and run day to day. It must be a real UK location where the work genuinely happens. For a small firm, a home office meets that test perfectly well, and home-based firms are authorised routinely.
The address that can't be a fiction
What the principal place of business cannot be is a convenience: a mail-forwarding suite or a virtual-office address where nobody from the firm actually works. The FCA wants to know where it — and its post, and if necessary its supervisors — can find the people running the firm. If the honest answer is “the director's home in Manchester”, then that's the right answer on the form, and it's a perfectly good one. Describing your premises accurately, however modest, always beats dressing them up; consistency between the form and reality is part of what the assessment checks.
Registered office vs principal place of business
Limited companies have a second address in play: the registered office at Companies House. The two don't have to match. A common, sensible arrangement for a home-based firm is a professional registered-office service for the Companies House record — keeping statutory mail and the fully public register away from your front door — while the FCA application gives your home as the genuine principal place of business. (If you're weighing company structures more broadly, see sole trader vs limited company for FCA authorisation.)
What actually becomes public
Two registers matter. Companies House publishes your registered office — which is why the service-address arrangement above exists. And once authorised, your firm appears on the Financial Services Register with its contact details, so the address you give the FCA as your firm's contact point is visible to anyone who looks your firm up. If that visibility matters to you, think about the arrangement before you apply rather than after.
Do you need a lease or business rates?
The FCA is not your landlord. There's no requirement to hold a commercial lease, and working from a home you own or rent is fine — the application is interested in where and how the business runs, not in the tenure of the building. Whether home-working triggers anything with your mortgage provider, landlord or council is a separate, non-FCA question worth a quick check.
When you move
Your principal place of business is a detail the FCA holds about your firm, so when it changes — the classic case being a home-based firm moving into premises as it grows — you tell the FCA through Connect. Address changes sit alongside the other standing notifications covered in our guide to ongoing obligations after authorisation. Apply from where you genuinely are today; update when reality changes.
The bottom line
A home address is a perfectly good principal place of business for a small firm, and it will not count against your application. Answer the premises questions with plain accuracy, use a registered-office service if Companies House visibility bothers you, and remember the address you give the FCA becomes your firm's public contact point. The rest of the application — the business plan, the policies, the people — is where approval is actually decided.