You are onboarding an overseas supplier and the compliance checklist says "obtain the company registration extract". In the UK that takes about ninety seconds on Companies House, for free. Then the supplier turns out to be German, or Spanish, or based in Ohio, and the ninety seconds become an afternoon of tabs. The question everyone types at that point is the same: what is the Companies House equivalent in this country?
What Companies House bundles, and what other countries split apart
There is no exact equivalent anywhere, and the reason is structural. Companies House does three jobs at once — it incorporates companies, it publishes what they file, and it hands all of it to the public at no charge. Most countries hand those three jobs to different institutions. So the useful question is not "what is the equivalent" but "which of the three do I actually need right now".
Companies House itself is an executive agency of the Department for Business and Trade, responsible for incorporating and dissolving limited companies and making registered company information available to the public; more than five million limited companies sit on its register. That concentration of roles is the exception, not the norm.
Abroad, cases fall into four families: countries with a single national register, countries where the register exists but is kept by many local bodies, countries with no national register at all, and Australia, where the securities regulator happens to be the registrar. Placing your country in the right family saves most of the work.
Ireland, the Netherlands and France: one national register, one front door
These come closest to the British model. One national institution, one public search, and a free tier that is enough to identify a company and confirm it exists. Payment starts when you ask for a document, not when you search.
In Ireland the job belongs to the Companies Registration Office, which keeps the Register of Companies. The European e-Justice portal notes that access to basic company information is free of charge, while a fee applies to the retrieval of any other information. Same logic as Companies House, with a narrower free document set.
In the Netherlands the Handelsregister belongs to the Kamer van Koophandel, the Dutch Chamber of Commerce. Its distinguishing feature is scope: it covers not just limited companies but sole traders, associations, foundations, licensed professionals and even government offices. Basic information — contact details, the Chamber of Commerce number and the establishment number — is available free of charge.
France changed recently, and most of the guides you will find have not caught up. Since 1 January 2023 every business operating on French territory must be registered with the Registre national des entreprises, operated by the INPI, which merged the former commercial, trades and agricultural registers into one. Its public data is freely searchable. The Kbis extract — the document that carries legal weight in front of a third party — is still issued by the commercial court registries for a state-set fee. If you need the underlying French data sources, we mapped them in our overview of French company databases.
Germany, Spain and Italy: the register exists, but nobody keeps it alone
In these three countries the answer has two layers: a national search portal on top, and a crowd of local registrars underneath. You search in one place, but the authority that writes the record changes with the city.
Germany is the clearest case. The Handelsregister is kept locally by the district courts, and the shared portal aggregates the commercial, cooperative, partnership and association registers of every federal state. The e-Justice portal states that an electronic register extract costs EUR 4.50, while access to accounting documents on the Unternehmensregister, run by Bundesanzeiger Verlag, is free. The counter-intuitive result: in Germany the accounts are easier to get than the company's identity record.
In Spain the Registros Mercantiles are kept by the registradores, organised province by province. Budget for it before you start, because access to the business register in Spain is not free of charge. There is no Spanish counterpart to the open British search.
Italy sits in between. The Registro delle Imprese is run by the chambers of commerce with support from Unioncamere, and access to the register and to a limited amount of information, such as the name and address of a company, is free of charge, with complete information available on request and against payment.
One shortcut covers all three, and the rest of the European Union with them: the "Find a company" service on the European e-Justice portal queries the interconnected national registers from a single entry point. It is the fastest route when you do not yet know which member state the company was incorporated in, and it is the one link worth bookmarking if your suppliers are spread across the Union.
The United States and Canada have no national Companies House equivalent
Here the correct answer is that there is nothing national to look for. Incorporation happens one level down, and the federal body that superficially resembles Companies House covers only a slice of the economy. Searching for "the American Companies House" wastes time because the thing does not exist.
In the United States, a company registers in the state where it operates. The Small Business Administration is explicit: an LLC, corporation, partnership or nonprofit corporation will probably need to register in any state where it conducts business activities, usually with the Secretary of State. That means as many front doors as there are states, with wildly different interfaces, turnaround times and fees. EDGAR, the federal database run by the SEC, only exposes filings from companies with a disclosure obligation — it is not a commercial register and it will not show you a privately held supplier.
Canada works on the same principle with a more legible federal layer. The Corporations Canada database confirms the existence of a corporation created under a federal corporate law, but it explicitly excludes corporations created under provincial or territorial law. For those, Canada's Business Registries searches across the provincial and territorial registers. A Canadian company can therefore be entirely legitimate and completely absent from the federal database.
Australia: the securities regulator is the registrar
Australia deserves its own line because the institution catches people out. The company register is not held by a dedicated incorporation agency but by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, the financial markets regulator. The same body licenses financial services and publishes the register of banned and disqualified directors.
The free tier is precisely drawn. ASIC gives you, at no charge, the company or organisation name, its type, its ABN, ACN, ARBN or ARSN, its registration date and the suburb, state and postcode of its registered office. Full addresses, history and documents belong to paid extracts, priced between ten and twenty-three Australian dollars depending on the extract. Worth knowing: officeholders' addresses are deliberately withheld from those extracts on safety grounds, so an ASIC search will not give you what a Companies House officer record gives you.
The number you are asked for has a different name in every country
The second thing that stalls a check is not the website, it is the identifier. Someone asking for "your Companies House number" is asking for something that does not exist outside the UK, and the clarification costs a round trip. Knowing which number carries authority locally removes it.
In France two numbers circulate: SIREN identifies the legal entity, SIRET identifies each individual establishment — a split that regularly surprises anyone expecting one number per company. In the Netherlands the public record carries a Chamber of Commerce number plus an establishment number. In Australia the ABN is a unique 11-digit number that identifies the business to government, other businesses and the public, held on the Australian Business Register and distinct from the ACN, which only applies to companies. That entity-versus-establishment distinction shows up again the moment you attach legal identifiers to a list of companies.
| Country | Official register | Who runs it | Basic search |
|---|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom | Companies House register | Agency of the Department for Business and Trade | Free |
| Ireland | Register of Companies | Companies Registration Office | Free (basic information) |
| Netherlands | Handelsregister | Kamer van Koophandel | Free (basic information) |
| France | Registre national des entreprises | INPI (Kbis extract: court registries) | Free; extract chargeable |
| Germany | Handelsregister / Unternehmensregister | District courts / Bundesanzeiger Verlag | Extract EUR 4.50; accounts free |
| Spain | Registros Mercantiles | Registradores, province by province | Chargeable |
| Italy | Registro delle Imprese | Chambers of commerce, with Unioncamere | Free (name and address) |
| Canada | Corporations Canada + provincial registers | Federal government and provinces | Free |
| Australia | Company and organisation registers | Australian Securities and Investments Commission | Free; extract AUD 10-23 |
| United States | No national register | Secretary of State of each state | Varies by state |
Free at Companies House, chargeable at most of its equivalents
This is the gap the link lists never mention, and it is the one that decides your method. Free, complete public search is a British outlier: of the nine countries reviewed here, five charge for either the extract or the access itself, and a sixth — the United States — lets every state set its own rules.
In practice, a one-off check before signing goes to the official register whatever it costs, because that is the record with legal standing. Verifying fifty suppliers across five countries at extract prices is a different exercise: it becomes a real line of spend, and above all a manual, record-by-record job that none of these registers is designed to spare you. They publish legal data — legal form, directors, status — not workable lists.
Keeping the two apart is what saves time. A register answers "who is this company". A company-data platform such as outsend answers a different question — "give me the businesses of this type in this country, with their contact details" — by building the list and exporting it across roughly 199 countries. They complement each other: the register certifies, the platform assembles. One honest limitation: automatic matching to official registry identifiers currently covers France only, because those are the public sources the platform queries. For Germany or Spain, the national register step stays manual. If your problem is building the list rather than certifying one company, you can request free alpha access.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a single European Companies House?
No, but the "Find a company" service on the European e-Justice portal comes close: it queries the interconnected commercial registers of EU member states from one entry point. It does not replace the national register, it routes you to it. The UK, having left the EU, is no longer included.
What is the Companies House equivalent in France?
There are two, depending on what you need. For freely searchable public data it is the Registre national des entreprises, operated by the INPI since 2023. For a document you can produce in front of a third party it is the Kbis extract, issued by the commercial court registry for a fee.
Can I get a foreign company's annual accounts for free?
It depends on the country, and not in the way you would guess. In Germany accounting documents on the Unternehmensregister are free while the register extract is chargeable. In Spain access to the register is chargeable. In Italy only the name and address are open.
Why does the United States have no Companies House?
Because company law there is a state competence, not a federal one. A company is incorporated in a given state and appears only in that state's register. The federal level intervenes only for specific obligations, such as SEC filings for companies with public disclosure requirements.
Are these registers enough to build a prospecting list?
No, and not only for technical reasons. They are built for record-by-record consultation and carry no usable commercial contact data. There is also a legal point: data being public does not amount to permission to process it, as we set out in our piece on data enrichment and GDPR compliance. Definitions for the wider field are collected in our prospecting glossary.