Guides · Spanish company register
Four official doors into the Spanish company register, and what each one gives you without paying
If you are used to Companies House in the United Kingdom, the first surprise in Spain is that there is no single website that does the same job. The register exists and it is public. It is spread over several official sites, each with a different purpose, and only some of what they hold is free.
This guide goes through the four official doors, in the order in which they are useful, and says plainly what each one gives you.
What "the Spanish company register" actually is
The register is the Registro Mercantil. It is not one office. A company is registered with the territorial commercial registry responsible for its registered office, where its registrable acts are entered. Most of these registries cover a province. There is also a Registro Mercantil Central in Madrid that gathers the essential data from all of them. The registries are run by the registrars, the Registradores de España.
The particulars of registered acts that the law requires to be published then appear as short notices in the official gazette, the Boletín Oficial del Registro Mercantil, known as BORME.
So there are two kinds of source. The registries hold the record. The gazette holds what was published about it, day by day.
Door 1: the registrars' free company directory
Since a 2023 reform, Spanish law lists the company information that must be available free of charge (article 17.5 of the Commercial Code):
- the name, legal form, registered office, Member State of registration, registration number and European Unique Identifier (EUID);
- the company's website, where one is recorded;
- its status, for example dissolved, liquidated, or economically active or inactive;
- its corporate purpose;
- the persons currently authorised to represent the company as its governing body or as members of that body, and whether they act alone or jointly;
- its branches in other EU member states.
The registrars publish this in the Directorio de sociedades on their open
data portal, opendata.registradores.org. The search is free and needs no
account. The interface is offered in English as well as Spanish, Catalan,
Basque and Galician. Before you can search you have to solve a small picture
puzzle, so it is a tool for looking up one company at a time, not for working
through a list. The portal itself describes the directory as a first version
that will be completed gradually.
This is the right first stop when the question is simply: is the company registered, where is its registered office, and what status is recorded?
Door 2: paid documents from the registrars
When you need a document rather than a lookup, the place is the registrars'
online office, sede.registradores.org, which also has an English interface.
Under "Business Registry" its services include:
- an informational extract of the company's record (nota informativa mercantil);
- copies of the filed accounts (depósito de cuentas);
- a registry certificate (certificación registral), which formally attests to the certified registry information.
Each of these is charged per document, and the fee is shown before you pay. Copies of the accounts filed with the registry are a paid service. They are not in the free directory and they are not in the gazette. Some companies' accounts can also be read free of charge through other channels: listed companies, for example, publish theirs through the securities regulator, the CNMV.
Door 3: the Registro Mercantil Central
The central registry in Madrid, at rmc.es, has two functions that matter to
someone researching a company. It issues the name certificate that anyone
needs before incorporating a company, which is why it is the place to check
whether a company name is already taken. It also provides information about
registered companies, using the data it receives from the territorial
registries. The site has a Spanish and an English version.
Door 4: BORME, the gazette
BORME is published by the state gazette agency on boe.es, on working days,
and reading it is free. Its electronic edition has been the official one
since 2009. It has two sections:
- Section I, "Empresarios", contains the registered acts and other acts published in the register, grouped by province: incorporations, appointments and departures of directors, capital changes, changes of address, dissolutions, insolvency entries and so on;
- Section II carries announcements and legal notices, such as calls to general meetings. These are published one by one.
You reach an issue through a calendar, by date. There is also an open data service that returns the summary of a given day in XML or JSON, and the announcements of Section II can be searched in a dedicated database on the same site.
BORME is a free official record of the corporate acts and announcements published over time, so it shows a company's past and not only its present state. Its limit is the way Section I is organised: by date and province, not by company. Reconstructing what was published about one company over fifteen years can mean going through a great many issues, or processing them automatically.
What you cannot get for free
- Copies of the filed accounts. They are public, and obtaining them from the registry is a paid service.
- A full shareholder list. The register does not generally provide a complete, up-to-date list of shareholders. The incorporation documents identify the founders, and the registration of a single-shareholder company identifies its sole shareholder.
- A tax number in every notice. BORME does not consistently give a company's tax identifier (NIF), although some announcements include it.
- History in one place. The free directory shows the present. The past is in the gazette, scattered over thousands of daily issues.
Where foreign readers get stuck
Search by the registered name. Use the registered company name or, where
the service allows it, the NIF. Spanish company names carry their legal form:
SL or SOCIEDAD LIMITADA for a private limited company, SA for a public
limited one. A trading brand may be different from the registered name.
The registry depends on the registered office. A company's notices appear in the part of the gazette that corresponds to its registry. Moving the registered office into another registry's district changes the competent registry too.
Several numbers, different jobs. The NIF is the tax identifier. The registry identifies a company by its sheet number (hoja) in the relevant registry. The EUID is the European identifier built from the registry details. They are not interchangeable, so check which one a form or a service is asking for.
The language. An English interface does not mean English documents. BORME notices are in Spanish, in a condensed legal style full of abbreviations, and some registry documents may be in another of Spain's co-official languages.
Where BORMEAPI fits
BORMEAPI is not a registry and does not replace an official extract. It reads the company notices that BORME has published since 2009 and turns that condensed style into typed events in English, grouped by company, so that the published history of one company is one request instead of a search through daily issues.
GET /v1/events?company_name_contains=VAZ%20METALES&limit=20
GET /v1/companies/vaz-metales-sl/events?limit=100The free key allows 50 requests a day for the events published in the last seven days, which is enough to see the format and to watch what is being published today. The full archive, looking a company up by its NIF, and change alerts are in the paid plans. Every result keeps the reference to the official notice it came from, so you can always go back to the source.
The practical order is this: confirm in the free directory that the company is registered, read its published history in the gazette or through an API built on it, and pay the registrars for an informational extract or a copy of the accounts when you need the document itself. If you need formal proof of what the register says, ask for a registry certificate.