Bulgaria Company Register: How to Search the Commercial Register and Verify Bulgarian Companies (2026)

1. What is the Bulgarian company register?

Until 2008, every Bulgarian provincial court kept its own register of traders. The Commercial Register Act entered into force on 1 January 2008 and handed the job to the Registry Agency, which sits under the Minister of Justice. The registers of all 28 provincial courts were consolidated into one electronic database, and existing traders had until 31 December 2011 to re-register. Sole traders and branches of foreign traders that did not were treated as deleted from 1 January 2012, and companies that did not lost the right to trade on that date. Since 1 January 2018 associations and foundations sit in the same database, which is why the official name covers non-profit legal entities too.

The register runs on two texts: the Act on the Commercial Register and the Register of Non-Profit Legal Entities, and Ordinance No 1 of 14 February 2007. The company forms themselves come from the Commerce Act of 1991. The Act defines the register as one database holding the circumstances that must be entered by law, such as name, seat, directors, and capital, and the acts that must be announced by law, such as annual financial statements. Next to that, each entity has an electronic case file with the applications and supporting documents.

2. How to search the Commercial Register step by step

Anyone may search, and Ordinance No 1 makes references in the register free. The portal runs in Bulgarian and English. The English version translates the menus and the field labels, but the data itself, names, addresses, activities, and the documents, stays in Bulgarian, in Cyrillic.

1. Open References on the Registry Agency portal

   Go to portal.registryagency.bg, choose Commercial register and register of NPLE, then References. No account is needed. The first reference, "Reference by natural person or legal entity", has a Person and a Legal entity option. Pick Legal entity and you get two fields: UIC/PIC/Bulstat and Company/name.

   

2. Search by UIC when you have one

   A UIC returns exactly one entity. Expand the hit and the portal lists every field in the register where that entity appears: under its own name, and also wherever it is a partner, an owner, or a member of another entity's management body.

   

3. Search by name in Cyrillic, not Latin

   The Commerce Act requires a trader to write its name in Bulgarian, and the register keeps it in Cyrillic. A record can also carry a spelling in a foreign language (field 4, SOPHARMA on Sopharma's record), but the name search does not match on it. "SOPHARMA" returns no match, while "СОФАРМА" returns seven entities: Sopharma AD, five other companies with Sopharma in their name, and a sports club.

4. Open the State of play for the full record

   State of play takes a UIC and shows the record as it stands, or as it stood on a date you choose. The fields are numbered: 1 UIC, 2 name, 3 legal form, 4 transcription in a foreign language, 5 head office, 6 scope of activity, 10 representatives, 12 board of directors, 31 capital, and so on. Each field carries the number of the entry that put it there, written as date and time: Sopharma's name dates from entry 20080411122002, 11 April 2008, when it moved into the new register.

5. Check the Announced acts and the Case tab

   Announced acts lists everything the company has published, and the documents download without an account. Sopharma's annual financial statements run from a first set announced in July 2008 to the statements for 2025, announced on 23 September 2026. The Case tab lists every application filed in the register, 163 for Sopharma when we checked, each with its result. The scanned documents behind those applications are registered access, which needs an electronic signature or a certificate issued by the Agency.

3. What data is public and what it costs

Bulgaria puts a lot on the free record and charges small, fixed amounts for the rest. The fees come from the tariff of state fees collected by the Registry Agency, which the Agency republished with euro amounts for the changeover. A certificate in electronic form costs less than the same certificate on paper.

Two things are worth pulling out of that table. First, the filed annual accounts are free: they sit under Announced acts and download without an account, and the Act charges companies no fee for publishing them either. Second, the whole database costs EUR 51.13 a year in the official tariff, but it is not a download. You send the Registry Agency a request in free text, it drafts a contract, and the service starts once the contract is signed and the fee paid.

What you will not find on the record: revenue or employee counts as fields. They exist only inside the filed financial statements, which are documents. The head office field can hold contact details as well: Sopharma's carries a phone number, fax, email address, and website. The main activity code under the national classification (NCEA) is optional under Ordinance No 1, and Sopharma's has not changed since its 2008 entry.

4. Bulgarian legal forms, briefly

Bulgaria does not split its register into divisions: traders, branches, and non-profit entities share one database and one style of number. The legal form is field 3 on every record, and the abbreviation is part of the name, as in "СОФАРМА" АД. The forms below come from the register's own list. Minimum capital has been set in euro since 1 January 2026: EUR 1 for a limited liability company and EUR 25,000 for a joint-stock company.

The register's list also covers cooperatives, state and municipal enterprises, European companies, European economic interest groupings, and community culture centres. If you are matching a supplier list, watch the single-owner forms: the Commerce Act requires an ООД whose capital belongs to one person to say so in its name (еднолично ООД, or ЕООД), so the abbreviation follows the number of owners.

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

1. Confirm the UIC, name, and seat

   Open the State of play for the UIC you were given and check that the name, legal form, and head office match. A name carrying "в ликвидация" (in liquidation) or "в несъстоятелност" (in insolvency) tells you the status at a glance, and the free Reference bankruptcy and Traders/Non-Profit Legal Entities at liquidation lists confirm it. For a quick first pass, our free company lookup finds the registration and revenue data in one search.

2. Check who may sign

   Managers of a limited liability company sit in field 7, representatives of a joint-stock company in field 10, and a joint-stock company's board of directors in field 12 (or a management board in field 13). Sopharma's board entry also shows the date its mandate expires. Check that the person signing for the company is listed, that the mandate has not run out, and how the record says the company is represented. Bulgarian law works in your favour here: a circumstance that should have been entered but was not is treated as not existing for third parties acting in good faith.

3. Look at recent changes and the Case tab

   Every field carries the entry number of the change that put it there, which starts with the date. A new representative, a new seat, or a capital change entered shortly before your deal is worth asking about, and State of play can show the record as it stood on the day a contract was signed. The Case tab adds what the record leaves out: a run of refusals or instructions on recent applications.

4. Check the annual financial statements

   Companies must publish their statements in the register by 30 September of the following year. Open Announced acts and check that the latest year is there, then download it. A missing year, or a one-off declaration that the company had no activity, is a signal in itself.

5. Follow mergers and predecessors

   The record lists the transformations entered on it and the companies involved, with their UICs on the more recent entries. Sopharma's shows six mergers, the latest the merger of Veta Pharma (UIC 104111084) into Sopharma, entered in 2024. If your records hold a predecessor's number, the trail to the current company starts here.

6. Validate the VAT number

   Check the VAT number separately in the EU's VIES service, because the register record does not tell you whether a company is registered for VAT. Sopharma's is BG 831902088, its UIC with BG in front, and VIES returns it as valid under the name СОФАРМА - АД.

6. Limitations of the official register

To be clear: for a handful of lookups, the Commercial Register is free, detailed, and gives you the accounts as well. The limits appear when you do not read Bulgarian, need the documents behind the record, or need scale:

• Cyrillic data, Latin search fails. Names, addresses, activities, and filings are in Bulgarian. A record can carry a foreign-language spelling, such as SOPHARMA, but a name search in Latin letters does not find it, and not every record has one.
• The case file needs registered access. To open the scanned applications and supporting documents online you need an electronic signature, or a certificate the Agency issues at its offices on an application and an identity document.
• Accounts are documents, not data. Sopharma's 2024 consolidated statements are a 254-page PDF in Bulgarian. Small companies that are not audited only have to publish at least a balance sheet and notes, sole traders that are not audited publish nothing, and a company with no activity files a one-off declaration instead.
• Beneficial owners are not open to everyone. They are entered in the register, but since 2025 the law limits access to the authorities, to obliged entities doing customer due diligence, and to anyone who can show a legitimate interest.
• Slow processing in 2026. The Registry Agency reported an average delay of about four working days in May 2026 and a backlog of over 600,000 unprocessed annual financial statement applications from earlier periods, many of them scanned. In August it said euro-related filings were making Commercial Register processing take longer than usual. On Sopharma's record, the 2025 annual statements filed on 2 July 2026 and an invitation to a general meeting filed on 25 August were both entered on 23 September.
• No bulk mode on the portal. The portal shows one record at a time. The whole database comes from the Agency by contract, after payment, and automated access is a paid service on terms the Agency sets.
• The record starts at re-registration. Traders moved into the new register between 2008 and 2011, and the entries on the record date from that move: Sopharma's oldest are from 11 April 2008. The court-era company file was scanned into the register on re-registration, so it sits in the case file, behind registered access. The record keeps a pointer to it: Sopharma's still shows company case 19359/1991.

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

7. Access Commercial Register data programmatically

CompanyData maintains a normalized database of all 1,248,186 Bulgarian entities, sourced directly from the Commercial Register and refreshed as new entries and filings appear. UICs are already parsed and validated, filed annual financial statements are read out of the announced acts into structured fields, and records are enriched with revenue and employee counts, which the official register does not publish as fields, plus industry codes and contact data where the register holds none.

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

GET /v1/companies?country=BG&registration_id=831902088

{
  "name": "СОФАРМА",
  "legal_form": "АД",
  "registration_id": "831902088"
}

Every value above is visible on the register's free search result shown earlier in this guide: the name, the legal form that is part of it, and the UIC. Revenue and employees come back on the same record where we hold them, and are absent here for the reason this guide keeps running into: the Commercial Register does not publish them as fields.

8. Bulgaria vs other company registers

Bulgaria puts the full record and the filed accounts on the free side and charges a few euro for certificates. The hurdles are the Cyrillic data and machine access that needs a contract. For context: