Belgium Company Register: How to Search the KBO/BCE and Verify Belgian Companies (2026)

1. What is the Belgian company register?

Belgium built its register around one idea: a company should hand its details to the government once, not once per department. The Crossroads Bank for Enterprises (CBE) is the database that makes that work. Owned by the FPS Economy, it holds the basic data of every registered entity and every establishment unit, and assigns each a unique identification number that all other authorities use to exchange information. The tax office, the social security office, and the company courts point at the same record.

That central design is why Belgium has no equivalent of Germany's 150 separate court registers. Registration still happens in different places, at a company court registry, a notary, or an accredited business counter, but it all lands in one database under one number. What the CBE does not hold is the paperwork. Company deeds are published in the annexes to the Belgian Official Gazette, and financial statements are filed with the National Bank's Central Balance Sheet Office. Each company record links out to both.

In short: the CBE tells you a company exists and who runs it, the Official Gazette annexes tell you what it formally decided, and the Central Balance Sheet Office tells you how it performs.

2. How to search the CBE step by step

Searching is free and requires no registration. Public Search runs in Dutch, French, German, and English, and unlike most European registers the English version is a real translation rather than a menu skin: field labels, legal forms, and director roles all come back in English.

1. Open CBE Public Search

   Pick the tab that matches what you have. There are five: search by number, by name, by activity, by authorisation, and by address. Searching by enterprise number is the only one that gives you a guaranteed single match.

   

2. Enter the keyword and narrow it down

   The keyword field is mandatory. Add a postcode if the name is common, and use the legal form dropdown to cut out noise. Leave the active-entities box ticked unless you are after a dissolved company, because the register keeps every entity regardless of state.

3. Watch the language of the name

   Belgian companies register names in Dutch and French separately, and often an abbreviation on top. Anheuser-Busch InBev carries a Dutch name, a French name, and the abbreviations AB Inbev and A.P.I. A search that fails on one spelling can succeed on another.

4. Open the company record

   You get the enterprise number, status, legal situation, start date, every registered name, the registered seat, entity type and legal form, the establishment units, and the NACE-BEL activity codes. None of it is behind a paywall.

   

5. Expand the directors and follow the external links

   Click "Show the legal functions" for the full board with appointment dates. Further down, the external links take you to the company's publications in the Official Gazette, its filed annual accounts at the National Bank, and the database of notarial deeds and powers of representation.

3. What data is public and what it costs

Belgium is one of the cheaper registers in Europe to read and one of the more expensive to reuse. Everything a human can click on is free. The price appears the moment you want the same data through a machine, or all of it at once commercially.

Two things are worth pulling out of that table. Belgium publishes full financial statements free, in XBRL since April 2007 and in CSV since April 2022, which is unusual and genuinely useful. And there is no official extract PDF from Public Search at all. A certified document for a bank or a tender comes from the company court registry, not the public portal.

What you will not find anywhere in the CBE: revenue, employee counts, contact details, or trading names. The record for a company the size of Anheuser-Busch InBev lists phone, fax, email, and web address as "No data included in CBE". The financial block holds share capital, the month of the annual meeting, and the financial year end, and nothing else.

4. Belgian legal forms, briefly

Belgium has no register divisions in the German sense. The record tells you two things instead: whether the entity is a legal person or a natural person, and which legal form it took. The 2019 Companies and Associations Code cut the number of available forms sharply, but the register still carries every company incorporated under the old rules, so modern and legacy forms sit side by side in the same search filter.

If you are matching a supplier list against the register, expect both spellings of everything. A company can be BVBA in a 2016 contract and BV in its current filing without anything having changed except Belgian law.

5. How to verify a Belgian company: a practical checklist

1. Confirm the enterprise number and status

   Search the number on Public Search and check that the name, legal form, and registered seat match what you were given. Look at both the status field and the legal situation field, because an entity can be active while carrying a legal situation such as judicial reorganisation. For a quick first pass, our free company lookup finds the registration and revenue data in one search.

2. Check whether the number replaced an older one

   Belgian records carry a line when the number supersedes a previous one after a merger or restructuring. Anheuser-Busch InBev's current number replaced 0649.641.563 in 2016. If your records hold the old number, your match will fail unless you follow that link.

3. Verify the directors

   Expand the legal functions and check that the person signing for the company is actually on the list, with an appointment date that predates your contract. Belgium publishes this free and with dates, which is more than most registers give you.

4. Read the deeds in the Official Gazette

   Search the enterprise number in the annexes to the Belgian Official Gazette and filter by the type of deed you care about: appointments and resignations, capital changes, change of legal form, or restructuring. This is where a quiet change of control becomes visible.

5. Pull the annual accounts

   Follow the external link to the Central Balance Sheet Office and download the most recent filing, in XBRL or CSV if you plan to do anything with the numbers. Check the filing date as well as the figures, because a late filing is itself a signal.

6. Confirm the establishment unit

   If you are dealing with a branch or shop rather than the head office, open the list of establishment units and check that the address you were given is registered, and that the activity recorded there matches what the company says it does.

6. Limitations of the official register

To be clear: for a handful of lookups, Public Search is genuinely good and costs nothing. The limits show up when you need scale, contact data, or a stable view of activity:

• No contact data. Phone, fax, email, and web address are optional and most companies leave them empty. The register tells you a company exists at an address, and nothing about how to reach anyone there.
• No revenue or employee counts in the CBE. They exist, but in the National Bank's filings, in a different system and format, one company at a time.
• Activity codes churn. Belgium moved from NACE-BEL 2008 to NACE-BEL 2025, retired the 7-digit codes for e-commerce, itinerant trade, fairgrounds, and limited catering, and automatically substituted 5-digit ones. The FPS Economy warns in its own announcement that the substituted code may not match what the company actually does.
• The API is prepaid and slow to start. Access is sold in blocks of 2,000 requests, paid by bank transfer, and activated within seven working days of the money arriving.
• A day of latency. Registered and changed data becomes available the next day, in Public Search and in the web service alike.
• Commercial bulk reuse is expensive. The complete file is €30,000 per year for commercial use, and personal data from it may never be reused for direct marketing.
• No export, no bulk screen. Public Search returns one entity at a time and offers no way to download a result set.

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

7. Access Belgian register data programmatically

CompanyData maintains a normalized database of all 2,384,537 Belgian entities, sourced directly from the Crossroads Bank for Enterprises and the National Bank's filings and refreshed as new filings appear. Enterprise and establishment unit numbers are already reconciled, superseded numbers are linked to their successors, NACE-BEL 2008 and 2025 codes are mapped to each other, and records are enriched with revenue, employees, and contact data the official register does not publish.

The KBO API lets you look up any Belgian entity by enterprise number, name, or address and get structured JSON back in real time, with 150 free lookups to start and no prepaid blocks to buy first. It is part of our global Company Data API, used by developers, banks, and insurers, so Belgian checks work exactly like checks in any of 200+ other countries.

GET /v1/companies?country=BE&registration_id=0417497106

{
  "name": "Anheuser-Busch InBev",
  "legal_form": "NV",
  "registration_id": "0417497106",
  "city": "Brussel",
  "status": "active",
  "start_date": "1977-08-02",
  "nace_code": "70.100",
  "capital_eur": 1238608344.12,
  "establishment_units": 5,
  "last_accounts_filed": "2026-05-11"
}

Every field above comes from the official register. Revenue, employees, and contact details come back on the same record where we hold them, and are absent here for the reason this guide keeps running into: the Belgian register does not publish them.

8. Belgium vs other company registers

Belgium scores well on identifiers and financial disclosure and badly on programmatic access. For context: