How often does OFSI update the UK consolidated sanctions list?

Question

Accepted Answer

The Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI) publishes the UK consolidated sanctions list daily, with the file refresh typically landing at approximately 04:00 UTC. Updates can include new designations, modifications to existing entries (alias additions, address changes, designation-reason updates), revocations, and corrections. The published file is in CSV + XML format with a stable schema, so machine-readable consumers can diff one day's file against the previous to extract the daily change set.

UK regulated firms are expected to screen against the latest available version of the consolidated list at the moment a transaction is processed or a customer is onboarded. There is no formal grace period — a sanctions breach that occurs because a firm screened against a stale list (one that did not yet reflect a recent designation) is the firm's responsibility, not OFSI's. In practice, regulators apply a 24-48 hour reasonable-effort window for daily-refresh consumers; weekly-refresh consumers carry meaningfully higher exposure.

The Stratum sanctions-screening pipeline runs the OFSI ingest cron at 04:00 UTC each day, alongside the UN Consolidated List (refreshed as published, typically multiple times per week) and the EU Consolidated List of Financial Sanctions (refreshed daily). The processed JSON ships to an S3 index that the live screening API queries with a per-request cache. Every screening response stamps the list version into the audit-cert PDF so a regulator inspection can verify which list version was screened against. List-version stamping is also part of the LSAG-2025 expectation for letting agents.

How often does OFSI update the UK consolidated sanctions list?

Related