BORME API

Guides · Spanish company register

What the Spanish commercial register has in common with Companies House, where it differs, what a nota simple is, where the NIF comes from, and how to get the data into code

2026-10-26 · 7 min · guide

By BORMEAPI Engineering

The short answer is yes and no. Spain does have a public register of companies: the Registro Mercantil, the commercial register. What it does not have is a single agency with a single website that does everything Companies House does in the United Kingdom, from incorporations to free copies of accounts to a public API. Registration, registry information, official notices and the tax number are split between several bodies: the registries, the registrars' online services, a central registry, the state gazette and the tax agency, each with its own access rules. Some of their services are free and others are charged.

This article compares the two systems point by point, so that someone who knows Companies House can tell what to expect in Spain. For a walk through each official website, see our guide on how to search the Spanish company register.

Who keeps the register

In the UK, Companies House is one executive agency. It incorporates companies, receives their filings and publishes the register, all through one service.

In Spain, a company is registered at the territorial commercial registry of its registered office, and most of these registries cover a province. The registries are run by registrars (registradores), who are public officials. A Registro Mercantil Central in Madrid gathers the essential data from all of them and issues the certificate that a company name is not taken. The particulars that the law requires to be published appear in a daily gazette, the Boletín Oficial del Registro Mercantil (BORME), published by the state gazette agency on boe.es.

So the Spanish register is closer to a network than to a single office. That is the root of most of the differences below.

The comparison, point by point

Company identifier.

Directors and officers.

Owners.

Annual accounts.

History.

Cost.

Data in bulk and APIs.

The nota simple

When people in Spain need to see what the register says about a company today, they ask for a nota simple. On the registrars' online office, sede.registradores.org, the service is called nota informativa mercantil. Each registry also issues it at its counter.

It is a summary of what the company's sheet records: its identification data, its share capital, who represents it (directors and holders of powers of attorney), its BORME publications, its annual-account deposits and book legalisations, and pending filings or special situations such as an insolvency. When ordering, you select the sections of information you need, each priced separately; the total depends on the information requested and is shown before you pay. Occasional users do not need to register for an account.

A nota simple is informative. When you need formal proof of what the register says, for a court, a notary or a bank, ask for a registry certificate (certificación registral), which formally attests to what the register records. It is also charged, and ordering it online requires an electronic certificate.

Where the NIF comes from

The NIF (número de identificación fiscal, still often called CIF for companies) is issued by the tax agency, the Agencia Tributaria, when the company is set up. Its first letter reflects the legal form: B for a limited company (sociedad limitada), A for a public limited company (sociedad anónima), and so on. The last character is a check character.

The NIF is the number Spanish invoices, contracts and tax forms carry, so it is the number most people have. But the commercial register is not organised around it, and BORME notices do not consistently include it. That is why looking up "the company behind this NIF" in Spain is a harder question than it sounds, and why a service that answers it has to say how much it covers. For a company trading with other EU countries, the EU's VIES service confirms whether the number, prefixed ES, is registered for intra-EU transactions.

How to get the data programmatically

There are three levels.

  1. The raw gazette. The open data service on boe.es gives you each day's BORME summary and links to the notices. It is free and official. You still have to interpret the condensed legal style of the notices and link them to companies, whether you use the HTML or XML text or extract it from the PDFs. Our article on what BORME is and how to read it shows what a notice looks like.
  2. The registrars' services. The registrars supply informational extracts, registry certificates and copies of filed accounts; all are paid for and ordered company by company. Only a registry certificate formally attests to the contents of the register.
  3. An API built on the gazette. BORMEAPI reads the notices of registered acts (part A of Section I) that the BORME has published since 2009 and turns them into structured events, grouped by company. Each event keeps the original Spanish text, labels the act type and roles in English, and carries the reference to the official notice it came from. On 23 October 2026, that came to more than 9.6 million events about more than 3.2 million companies.

What BORMEAPI gives at each level:

GET /v1/companies/by-nif/B12345674
GET /v1/companies/by-hoja/M-800000
GET /v1/companies/{slug}/events?order=desc

The NIF lookup covers more than 580,000 companies, not all of them: a miss means we could not match that NIF, not that the company does not exist.

None of this replaces the register. BORMEAPI is not a registry and does not issue extracts or certificates. Its company events report what the BORME published. When you need a document with legal force, ask the registry for it.

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