UK Sanctions List Check: How to Screen Against the OFSI Consolidated List
How the UK sanctions regime works post-Brexit, what the OFSI Consolidated List contains, and how to run a UK sanctions check without missing designations the EU and US lists don't carry.
Since Brexit, the United Kingdom operates an autonomous sanctions regime under the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018 (SAMLA). The UK Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI), part of HM Treasury, publishes and maintains the UK Sanctions List — the authoritative dataset for anyone with UK exposure.
The OFSI Consolidated List looks similar to the EU list at first glance, but the two have diverged. Some individuals and entities are designated by the UK and not by the EU, and vice versa. Russia-related designations in particular have moved on different timelines since 2022. Programs that rely solely on EU data risk missing UK-only designations, and vice versa.
A UK sanctions check applies to UK persons (anywhere in the world), anyone within UK territory, and entities incorporated under UK law. Like OFAC, the UK regime requires you to freeze assets you hold for a designated person, refrain from making funds or economic resources available to them, and report to OFSI. Penalties include criminal liability and significant monetary penalties under SAMLA.
OFSI publishes the Consolidated List as machine-readable downloads (XML, CSV, JSON) and updates it as designations are added, varied, or revoked. Each entry contains the primary name, aliases, date of birth, nationality, identifying documents, the statement of reasons, and the underlying UK regulation (for example, the Russia (Sanctions) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019).
SanctionsScreening ingests the OFSI Consolidated List alongside OFAC SDN, OFAC Consolidated, EU, and UN, and deduplicates designations across regimes so a single search returns a unified view. Search the UK sanctions list free from the homepage — no account required for basic checks.