Austria Company Register: How to Search the Firmenbuch and Verify Austrian Companies (2026)

1. What is the Austrian company register?

Austria kept a paper Handelsregister until 1990. In 1991 it was replaced by the Firmenbuch, an electronic database, and everything entered since then, current and historical, has been available electronically. The document archive followed in 2005. That head start is why Austrian register data is unusually clean compared with Germany's, even though the two countries share a legal tradition and most of their vocabulary.

The Firmenbuch is governed by the Commercial Register Act (Firmenbuchgesetz) and the Commercial Code (Unternehmensgesetzbuch), and it is kept by the commercial register courts. It splits into two halves that behave very differently. The Hauptbuch, or principal register, holds the entries themselves: FN number, business name, legal form, registered office and business address, and the people authorised to represent the company. The Urkundensammlung, or document archive, holds the paperwork those entries are based on, including articles of association, sample signatures, and the financial statements of every company with an accounting obligation.

2. How to search the Firmenbuch step by step

Anyone may access the register, and the search itself costs nothing. JustizOnline runs in German and English, and the English version translates the record fields rather than just the navigation.

1. Open the Firmenbuch query on JustizOnline

   There is a single search box that accepts either a company name or an FN number. Switch the interface to EN in the top right if you would rather read the record in English.

   

2. Search by FN number when you have one

   An FN number returns a single entity immediately. There is no court to pick and no register division to guess at, which is the main practical difference from searching the German Handelsregister.

3. Search by name or by person when you do not

   If the FN is unknown you can search on the company name, and you can also search on the name of someone holding an office in the company, such as a managing director. Searching the register by director is something many European registers do not allow at all.

4. Open the company record

   The free summary gives you company status, the FN number, the legal form, and the registered office, along with the date the information was retrieved. That is enough to confirm a company exists and is still registered.

   

5. Buy the extract or the documents you actually need

   Below the summary sit the paid products and the document list. You need an ID Austria login to buy, and payment goes through Visa, Mastercard, or EPS online banking. The document list shows everything held electronically for that company.

3. What data is public and what it costs

Austria charges for almost everything, and charges very little. The fees are set in law per document type rather than negotiated, so the price you see on JustizOnline is the price everywhere. Only the summary is free.

Two things follow from that table. First, Austria sells filed annual accounts for EUR 1.52. Companies with an accounting obligation file their financial statements into the document archive, and anyone can buy them. Second, buying anything requires an ID Austria login and an online payment, which is a real obstacle if you are not resident in Austria. The free summary is genuinely useful, but it is a summary.

What you will not find in the Firmenbuch at all: revenue as a structured field, employee counts, industry codes, or contact details. The financial statements exist, but as filed documents in the archive rather than as data, so extracting figures means opening PDFs one company at a time.

4. Austrian legal forms, briefly

The Firmenbuch has no register divisions in the German sense, no HRA and HRB split. What differs between forms is whether entry is compulsory at all. Section 2 of the Commercial Register Act sets out who must be entered, and the list is narrower than most people expect.

One form is missing on purpose. The civil-law partnership, the Gesellschaft bürgerlichen Rechts, has no legal personality and is not entered in the Firmenbuch at all. Neither are small sole traders below the turnover thresholds. If an Austrian counterparty genuinely does not appear in the register, that is often the reason rather than a sign of anything wrong.

5. How to verify an Austrian company: a practical checklist

1. Confirm the FN number and the status

   Search the FN on JustizOnline and check that the name, legal form, and registered office match what you were given. The free summary shows the company status, which is all you need to confirm the entity is still registered. For a quick first pass, our free company lookup finds the registration and revenue data in one search.

2. Buy the current extract before you sign anything

   At EUR 4.89 the full extract is the cheapest due diligence available anywhere in Europe. It gives you the registered address, the share capital, and every person authorised to represent the company, which the free summary does not.

3. Check who may actually sign

   Austrian records distinguish between managing directors and the specific representation rules that apply to them, such as whether two must sign jointly. Verify that the person in front of you is listed and that they can bind the company alone.

4. Pull the historical extract if the deal is large

   For EUR 8.20 you get the deleted data as well as the current entries, back to 1991. Recent changes of director, of registered office, or of ownership structure all show up here, and a cluster of them shortly before a deal is worth asking about.

5. Buy the accounts from the document archive

   Open the document list and buy the most recent financial statements at EUR 1.52. Check the filing date as well as the figures. A company with an accounting obligation and no recent filing is telling you something.

6. Read the articles of association

   Also EUR 1.52, and worth it when the counterparty is a GmbH with an unusual capital structure or restrictions on transferring shares. This is where those restrictions are written down.

6. Limitations of the official register

To be clear: for a handful of lookups, the Firmenbuch is accurate, cheap, and fast. The limits appear when you need scale, structure, or data the register was never designed to hold:

• No public API. The Ministry of Justice publishes no programmatic interface. Access at scale is licensed through the Verrechnungsstellen, ten accredited private companies that resell the database on the Ministry's behalf, each on its own commercial terms.
• ID Austria gates everything paid. Buying an extract or a document requires an Austrian digital identity and an online payment. For a foreign buyer doing occasional checks, that is a real barrier.
• Accounts are documents, not data. Financial statements sit in the archive as filed PDFs. Cheap to buy, expensive to turn into numbers.
• No firmographics. Revenue as a field, employee counts, industry codes, and contact details are simply not in the Firmenbuch.
• Not everyone is in it. Civil-law partnerships never appear, and sole traders below the turnover thresholds appear only if they choose to.
• Nothing older than 1991. The electronic register starts there, and the document archive only from 2005. Anything earlier is paper.
• One company at a time. There is no bulk screen, no export, and no way to ask the portal which Austrian companies match a set of criteria.

If you verify one Austrian supplier a quarter, none of this matters. If you onboard hundreds, it is the whole problem.

7. Access Firmenbuch data programmatically

CompanyData maintains a normalized database of all 865,758 Austrian entities, sourced directly from the Firmenbuch and refreshed as new entries and filings appear. FN numbers are already parsed and validated, filed financial statements are read out of the document archive into structured fields, and records are enriched with revenue, employees, industry codes, and contact data that the official register does not publish at all.

Our Company Data API lets you look up any Austrian entity by FN number, name, or address and get structured JSON back in real time, with 150 free lookups to start and no ID Austria login required. It is used by developers, banks, and insurers across 190+ countries, so Austrian checks work exactly like checks anywhere else.

GET /v1/companies?country=AT&registration_id=FN56247t

{
  "name": "Red Bull GmbH",
  "legal_form": "GmbH",
  "registration_id": "FN 56247t",
  "city": "Fuschl am See",
  "status": "registered"
}

Every field above is what the free summary on JustizOnline shows. Revenue, employees, and industry codes come back on the same record where we hold them, and are absent here for the reason this guide keeps running into: the Firmenbuch does not publish them.

8. Austria vs other company registers

Austria trades free access away and buys back precision. For context: