What does Gibraltar law actually require on a company letterhead?

Section 180 of the Companies Act 2014 requires every Gibraltar company to show, in legible characters, on its business letters and order forms: its place of registration, its registered number, the address of its registered office, and — where they apply — a note that it's exempt from using "Limited" in its name, a note that it's an investment company under EU Directive 2013/34/EU, and a note that it's being wound up. Any mention of share capital must be to the paid-up figure specifically.

Is Gibraltar company law just the UK's Companies Act with a different postcode?

No — this is the mistake most template sites and even some legal-content pages make. Gibraltar has its own legislature, its own Companies House (companieshouse.gi) and its own Companies Act 2014, entirely separate from the UK's Companies Act 2006. Writing "a company registered in England and Wales" on a Gibraltar company's letterhead is factually wrong, not just stylistically off.

What happens if my letterhead is missing the required Companies Act details?

Section 180(3) makes it a criminal offence, not just an administrative gap. The company itself is liable to a fine at level 2 on the standard scale, and separately, any officer who issues or authorises a non-compliant business letter or order form is personally guilty of the same offence. It's the person who signed off the artwork who carries the personal exposure, which is why getting the footer right matters even for a single letter run.

Does the same rule apply to cheques and invoices, not just letters?

Yes, and it's arguably stricter there. Section 179 requires the company name to appear legibly on notices, invoices, bills of exchange and cheques purporting to be signed on the company's behalf, and section 179(4) makes an officer who signs a non-compliant one personally liable to the payee for the full face amount of the bill or cheque, on top of the criminal fine — sharper than the equivalent UK exposure.

I run a Gibraltar branch of a foreign company — do I need a different letterhead?

Yes. Section 456 replaces the ordinary section 180 list with branch-specific particulars: the branch's own place of registration and registered number in Gibraltar, plus — for companies incorporated outside a European Economic Area member State — the name of the home-country registry, the registration number there, the company's legal form, and the location of its head office.

What postcode do I put on a Gibraltar letterhead?

GX11 1AA — the single postcode that covers the entire territory, with no separate town or city line since "Gibraltar" serves as both. This editor pre-fills it automatically rather than asking you to type it, since every Gibraltar address shares the same one.

Free Letterhead Templates for Gibraltar Businesses

What a Gibraltar company letterhead actually needs to show — and why the UK rules don't apply

Search for a Gibraltar letterhead template and Google hands you two sets of results that never meet. The template marketplaces — template.net, Canva, TemplateLab — have never heard of Gibraltar and default to a paper size that isn't even the right one for this market. The legal-requirement pages, by contrast, are all written for the wrong jurisdiction: they quote the UK's Companies Act 2006, section 82, and tell you to write "a company registered in England and Wales" — which is simply wrong for a company registered here. Gibraltar has its own legislature, its own Companies House, and its own Companies Act 2014, and its letterhead rules sit in sections 179, 180 and 456 of that Act, not in anything Westminster passed.

This page is built around that gap. Every template opens on true A4, the footer fields are named after what section 180 actually asks for — place of registration, registered number, registered office — rather than a generic "address" box, and GX11 1AA, the single postcode that covers the whole territory, is already there so you don't have to look it up. Fill in your details and export to PDF or Word, no account, no watermark.

The Companies Act 2014 — Gibraltar's own letterhead law, not the UK's

Gibraltar is a British Overseas Territory, but for company law purposes it is not England and Wales, and the UK Companies Act 2006 has no application here. Gibraltar passed its own Companies Act in 2014, and section 180 — headed, in the Act itself, "Particulars to be shown on letterheads, etc." — sets out what has to appear, in legible characters, on every business letter and order form a Gibraltar company sends: the place of registration, the registered number, the address of the registered office, a note if the company is exempt from having to use the word "Limited" in its name, a note if it's an investment company as defined by EU Directive 2013/34/EU, and a note if the company is being wound up. If the letter mentions share capital at all, the figure quoted has to be the paid-up capital, not the nominal or allotted figure — a detail template sites simply have no field for, because their designers have never had reason to open the Gibraltar statute book.

Section 180(3) makes non-compliance a criminal offence, not a paperwork slip: the company itself is liable to a fine at level 2 on the standard scale, and — separately — any officer who issues or authorises the issue of a non-compliant letter or order form is personally guilty of the same offence. Whoever signs off the letterhead artwork is the one exposed, which is exactly the kind of detail a company-formation agent setting up several new entities in a week needs to get right for each one, not just once.

Section 179 adds a second, older duty: the company's name has to be displayed at every place it does business and stated in legible characters on notices, bills of exchange, cheques, invoices and letters of credit purporting to be signed on the company's behalf. Get this wrong and it's sharper than the equivalent UK failure — under section 179(4), an officer who signs a non-compliant cheque or bill is personally liable to the holder for the face amount, on top of the criminal fine, unless the company pays it. And if the company is actually a Gibraltar branch of an overseas business rather than a Gibraltar-incorporated company, section 456 applies instead: the branch's place of registration and registered number, plus — for companies incorporated outside a member State — the home registry, home registration number, legal form and location of the head office.

Gibraltar-incorporated limited company — place of registration (Gibraltar), Companies House Gibraltar registered number, registered office address, plus the "Limited"-exemption, investment-company and winding-up flags where they apply (Companies Act 2014 s.180).
Any reference to share capital on the letter — must be to paid-up capital specifically, not the nominal or allotted figure.
Gibraltar branch of a foreign company — the branch's own place of registration and registered number, plus the home-country registry name and number, legal form and head-office location (s.456).
All companies — the name itself, legible, on notices, invoices, bills of exchange and cheques purporting to be signed on the company's behalf (s.179), with personal liability for the officer who signs a non-compliant one.

A4, one postcode for the whole territory, and a layout that isn't quite the UK's

Gibraltar uses A4 the way the rest of Europe does, not the American Letter size that a lot of "international" template tools quietly default to. Every template on this page opens at true A4 with no resizing step. There's no Gibraltar standard dictating exactly where the address block or envelope window has to sit — Gibraltar has no standards body of its own, and nothing in local practice references the British printers' specification (BS 1808) that some UK stationers use for fold marks and window position. What Gibraltar businesses actually do is follow de-facto British convention: company name and logo at the top, the recipient's address in the upper-left below it, and a small-type footer reserved for the section 180 particulars. Treat that as sound layout practice, not a certified standard — nobody in Gibraltar is checking your fold marks against a spec, but they will notice a missing registered number.

Where Gibraltar addressing genuinely differs from the UK's is the postcode. There's only one — GX11 1AA — for the entire 6.7 square kilometres of the territory, and there's no separate town or city line: "Gibraltar" does the job of both locality and country. This editor pre-fills GX11 1AA as a constant rather than asking you to type it, because there's nothing to look up. Phone numbers take the +350 country code, not +44, and dates follow the British day-month-year order in full — 12 March 2026, never 3/12/2026 or March 12, 2026, both of which read as American to a Gibraltar recipient. Salutations pair strictly: "Dear Sirs" or "Dear Sir or Madam" closes with "Yours faithfully"; a named recipient like "Dear Mr Perez" closes with "Yours sincerely". Getting that pairing wrong is the kind of thing a Gibraltar solicitor or accountant notices immediately.

A Word template, Canva or a local print shop — how this actually compares

The top-ranking template site for a Gibraltar letterhead search today, template.net, lists both US Letter and A4 as "standard sizes" with no locale default at all, so a Gibraltar user has to know to pick A4 themselves — and it has no field, note or mention anywhere for the section 180 particulars, because it has no Gibraltar content of any kind. Canva holds two of the top five slots for the same search and is no better: general-purpose design software with no concept of a registered-number field or a paid-up-capital warning. A Microsoft Word letterhead template gets you an offline file with the same blank slate — you're building the compliance footer yourself from scratch, with no prompt telling you what belongs there.

Real Gibraltar printers exist — Image Graphics on Governor's Parade and EASI PRINT among them — and they'll happily run you off a box of headed paper. But neither one publishes anything about what the Companies Act actually requires you to put on it, and neither ranks for the searches Gibraltar directors actually run when they're setting up a new company's stationery. That leaves a real gap between "get 500 sheets printed" and "know what those 500 sheets legally have to say" — this editor is built for the second part: pick a template, fill in the section 180 fields once, and export a compliant PDF or Word file in the time it would take to explain the requirement to a printer.

Letterhead Templates for Gibraltar Businesses