Guides · BORME
What BORME is, what each section publishes, and how to read a notice without getting lost in the abbreviations
BORME stands for Boletín Oficial del Registro Mercantil, the Official Gazette of the Commercial Register. It is the official journal in which Spain publishes the legally prescribed particulars of acts registered by the commercial registries, concerning companies and other registered persons and entities, and the notices that the law requires to be made public: incorporations, appointments of directors, changes of address, capital increases, mergers, dissolutions, insolvency.
It is edited by the state gazette agency, the Agencia Estatal Boletín Oficial
del Estado, and published on boe.es. Reading it is free, and its electronic
edition has been the official one since 2009. It is published in Spanish.
When it is published
BORME is published Monday to Friday, except on public holidays observed in Madrid. There was no issue on Saturday 10 or Monday 12 October 2026, Spain's national day, for example. What is registered on those days appears in the following issues.
Days, sometimes weeks, usually pass between the entry in the registry and the publication. In registered-act notices, the date of the registry entry normally appears in brackets after the registry particulars, so you can tell when an act was registered and not only when it was published.
The two sections
Section I, "Empresarios". It has two parts:
- Registered acts (actos inscritos, part A in the open data): what the registries have entered, grouped by province;
- Other acts published in the register (otros actos publicados en el Registro Mercantil, part B), such as the filing of merger or demerger plans.
Section II, "Anuncios y avisos legales" (part C): announcements and notices that the law requires, distinct from the publication of registered acts, such as calls to general meetings, merger and demerger plans, capital reductions and increases, dissolutions, transformations and final liquidation balance sheets. Each announcement is published separately, grouped by announcement type and alphabetically by company name within each group.
Which acts appear among the registered acts
Notices use recurring headings, although their presentation varies. These are the most common, with their meaning:
- Constitución: incorporation, with the company's purpose, registered office and capital;
- Nombramientos, Ceses/Dimisiones, Revocaciones and Reelecciones: appointments, departures and resignations, revocations and re-elections of directors, board members, holders of powers of attorney, liquidators and auditors;
- Cambio de domicilio social, Cambio de denominación social, Cambio de objeto social and Modificaciones estatutarias: changes of registered office, name, corporate purpose and articles;
- Ampliación de capital and Reducción de capital: capital increase and reduction;
- Declaración de unipersonalidad, Pérdida del carácter de unipersonalidad and Cambio de identidad del socio único: a company becoming, or ceasing to be, single-shareholder, and a change of its sole shareholder;
- Fusión por absorción, Escisión parcial, Escisión total, Segregación and Transformación de sociedad: mergers, demergers, hive-downs and changes of legal form;
- Disolución and Extinción, which are not the same: dissolution normally begins liquidation, although a merger can involve dissolution without liquidation; extinction records the company's termination and the cancellation of its registry entries, subject to outstanding legal relationships;
- Situación concursal: developments in insolvency proceedings, including their opening or conclusion;
- Cierre provisional de la hoja registral: a provisional closure of the company's registry sheet, for example after its tax number is revoked.
How to read a notice
A registered-act notice looks like this. The example is invented, but it follows the real format:
412345 - EJEMPLO DE SERVICIOS SL.
Constitución. Objeto social: Consultoría informática. Domicilio: C/ MAYOR 1
(MADRID). Capital: 3.000,00 Euros.
Nombramientos. Adm. Unico: GARCIA LOPEZ MARIA.
Datos registrales. T 45000 , F 101, S 8, H M 800000, I/A 1 (06.10.26).Line by line:
- 412345 is the number of the notice within the year. It does not identify the company.
- EJEMPLO DE SERVICIOS SL. is the company name as registered, with its legal form.
- Constitución. and Nombramientos. are two separate acts entered together. A single notice can contain several registered acts.
- Adm. Unico is the sole director. Other common role abbreviations and labels: Adm. Solid. (one of several directors, each authorised to act alone), Adm. Mancom. (a director who must act jointly with another), Con.Delegado (managing director on the board), Apoderado (holder of a power of attorney), Liquidador (liquidator).
- Datos registrales says where the entry is: T is the volume, F the page, S the section, H the sheet (with the registry prefix: M identifies Madrid), I/A identifies the entry or annotation by a number, a letter or another reference, and the date of the entry is in brackets.
The sheet is what identifies a company within its registry: the name can change, the sheet does not. The tax number (NIF), on the other hand, is not supplied systematically, although some notices include it.
How to find what was published about one company
It depends on the section:
- Section II. The state gazette has a search for these announcements, with fields for the title (the company), free text, issue number and dates, covering announcements since 2001. It is the most direct way to find a call to a meeting or a merger plan.
- Section I. You browse it by date, through a calendar, and documents are grouped by province within each part. There is no search by company, so to rebuild a company's history you need to know the dates or go through the issues one by one.
- Open data. The gazette provides the table of contents of every issue published since January 2009 in XML or JSON, with links to each document. It is the basis for processing the gazette automatically. The official, authentic version is the signed PDF.
If you only need to know whether a company is registered and who is recorded as representing it through its governing body, the quickest route is not BORME but the registrars' free directory, explained in our guide to the Spanish company register.
What BORME does not contain
- Annual accounts. The gazette does not publish their content.
- A complete shareholder list. It does not generally provide a complete, current list of shareholders. Sole shareholders and, in certain cases, other members are identified.
- A contact, staff or turnover directory. Registered offices and, in some cases, company websites do appear.
- The current state. BORME is a sequence of changes. Appointments, departures and other notices reconstruct the published history of the governing body; to check which appointments are recorded as current, consult up-to-date registry information.
Where BORMEAPI fits
BORMEAPI reads the registered-act notices published since 2009, turns each heading and abbreviation into a typed event, and groups the events by company. Event types are expressed in English. What in the gazette is a search through thousands of PDFs published over the years becomes one request:
GET /v1/companies/vaz-metales-sl/events?limit=100You can also browse, without a key, the weekly summary of what was published in each province on our province pages, which are in Spanish. The free key allows 50 requests a day for the events published in the last seven days; the full archive since 2009 and change alerts are in the paid plans. Every event keeps the reference to the official notice it came from.