Colombia Company Register: How to Search the RUES and Verify Colombian Companies (2026)

1. What is the Colombian company register?

Colombia hands its commercial register to the chambers of commerce. Under the Commercial Code, the Registro Mercantil (commercial register) records the matrícula of every merchant and every commercial establishment, plus every act and document the law says must be registered: incorporations, amendments to the articles, liquidations, and the appointment and removal of legal representatives. The chambers keep it, and since 2022 the Superintendencia de Sociedades, which took this role over from the Superintendencia de Industria y Comercio, decides which books they keep and how entries are made. The Code is blunt about access: the register is public, and anyone may examine it, take notes, and obtain copies.

With 58 chambers each keeping their own part, the country needed one place to search all of them. That is the Registro Único Empresarial y Social (RUES), the Unified Business and Social Register. It started as the Registro Único Empresarial under Law 590 of 2000, which joined the Registro Mercantil and the register of public-procurement bidders. Decree 19 of 2012 added six more registers, including non-profit entities, the solidarity economy, and the national tourism register, and gave it its current name. The chambers administer it, and its portal is rues.org.co. Confecámaras, the confederation of Colombia's 58 chambers of commerce, publishes the basic Registro Mercantil data synchronised in the RUES as open data.

One more thing sets Colombia apart: registration is not a one-off. Every merchant renews its matrícula every year, within the first three months, and the renewal date is part of the public record. A Colombian record therefore tells you not just that a company was registered, but whether it still bothered to renew this year.

2. How to search the RUES step by step

A basic RUES search is free and needs no account. The portal is in Spanish only: there is no language switch, and legal forms, statuses, and field labels all stay in Spanish.

1. Open the RUES and pick the register

   The search bar on the homepage has a dropdown for the register you want to search. It defaults to Registro Mercantil, which is the one you want for companies. The other eight options cover non-profits, public-procurement bidders, the tourism register, payroll-loan operators, foreign non-profits, the solidarity economy, gambling vendors, and citizen oversight groups.

   

2. Use the advanced search when you have a number

   Búsqueda Avanzada has three tabs: identification number, name or keyword, and matrícula number, each with a chamber selector next to the field. A matrícula number only makes sense together with the chamber that issued it. The identification field takes plain digits only, so leave out the dots and the hyphen.

3. Filter the results

   The result list filters by category (natural person, legal person, branch, agency, or commercial establishment) and by status (active or cancelled). The category filter matters more than it looks: commercial establishments have their own matrícula in Colombia, separate from the merchant that owns them, so a name search can also return establishments, agencies, and branches as entries of their own.

4. Read the record

   By law, the RUES has to show at least the chamber that registered the business, the company name, the NIT, the matrícula and renewal dates, the vigencia (the registered duration), the type of organisation, the category and status of the matrícula, the economic activity, its establishments, agencies, and branches, the principal and alternate legal representatives, and any limits on their power to contract. That has been free on the RUES website since April 2012.

5. If the search comes back empty

   From our test connection outside Colombia, the RUES loaded normally, but every search came back with "No se encontraron resultados": Ecopetrol by name, and NIT 899999068 in the advanced search. The request to the search service behind the page was refused, and the chamber dropdown in the advanced search stayed empty. Ecopetrol does exist. Confecámaras' own open data lists ECOPETROL S A as active, registered with the Bogotá chamber under matrícula 1291197. An empty RUES result is therefore not proof that a company does not exist.

3. What data is public and what it costs

Colombia splits cleanly between free information and paid proof. Reading the basic data costs nothing, by law. The moment you need a document that counts as evidence, you buy a certificate from the chamber, at a price the national government sets every year.

The certificate prices are not set by the chambers. The national government fixes them every year under Decree 1074 of 2015, as amended by Decree 045 of 2024, in UVB, a value unit the Ministry of Finance set at COP 12,110 for 2026, and the result is rounded. A certificate costs the same regardless of the number of pages. The certificate is also the only thing the Commercial Code accepts as proof of a registration, short of a judicial inspection of the register itself, so for a bank, a tender, or a court it is the document you need.

What you will not find in the free basic data: revenue, assets, employee counts, or contact details. None of them is on the list the law guarantees, and the open-data extract has no address, phone, email, or financial column at all. Financial statements are filed elsewhere. Under Law 222 of 1995, a company deposits a copy of its approved general-purpose financial statements, with the notes and any auditor's opinion, at the chamber of its registered office within a month of approval, and the chamber issues copies to anyone who asks and pays the cost. Companies that file their statements with the Superintendencia de Sociedades skip the chamber deposit, and their figures appear free in its SIIS portal instead.

4. Colombian legal forms, briefly

Colombian company names carry their legal form as a suffix, and the law makes that suffix count: leave it out and the members can lose their limited liability. The Commercial Code supplies the classic forms, and two later laws added the empresa unipersonal and the S.A.S., which has since become the most common company form in the register.

In practice the S.A.S. has taken over. Among the active records in Confecámaras' open data, S.A.S. companies outnumber the Ltda. by more than two to one and the S.A. by more than thirty to one. Any company can convert into an S.A.S. by a unanimous decision registered with the chamber, so if you are matching an older supplier list, expect companies that were Ltda. in one document and S.A.S. in a later one.

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

1. Confirm the NIT and the status

   Search the NIT on the RUES, or in the open data if the portal does not answer, and check that the name, legal form, and chamber match what you were given. Look at the status of the matrícula, not just whether a record exists, because the register keeps cancelled businesses too. For a quick first pass, our free company lookup finds the registration and revenue data in one search.

2. Check the last year renewed

   Every company must renew its matrícula in the first three months of the year, and late renewal is sanctioned. Ecopetrol's open-data record shows 2026 as the last year renewed, on 30 March 2026. A company that has not renewed for five years is dissolved and placed in liquidation in the chambers' annual purge, so a renewal gap of a year or two is already worth a question.

3. Check the vigencia

   Colombian companies are registered with a duration, and a company dissolves when its term expires unless it was extended in time. An S.A.S. may be set up for an indefinite term. Ecopetrol's vigencia runs to 7 July 2103. A date in the near future on a counterparty is something to raise before you sign a long contract.

4. Check who may sign

   The free basic data includes the principal and alternate legal representatives and any limits on their power to contract. Make sure the person signing is listed, and that the contract does not exceed what the record allows them to commit to on their own.

5. Buy the certificate of existence and legal representation

   For COP 12,100 the chamber certifies that the legal person exists and who its legal representative is, and the certificate always carries the NIT. It is the document a bank or a tender will ask for, and it is the only proof of a registration the Commercial Code recognises outside a court.

6. Check the financials and insolvency status in SIIS

   If the company reports to the Superintendencia de Sociedades, SIIS shows its assets, revenue, and profit for cut-off years from 2015, in thousands of pesos, and lets you filter for companies in liquidation or reorganisation. Absence from SIIS is not a red flag by itself: a search for Ecopetrol returns only Ecopetrol Costa Afuera Colombia S.A.S. (NIT 900.925.798), not Ecopetrol S.A. For a company that is not there, ask its chamber for a copy of the financial statements it deposited.

6. Limitations of the official register

To be clear: on paper, Colombia gives away more than most registers in the region, with free basic data by law and a monthly open-data extract. The limits show up when you need the portal to work, need financials, or need to work at scale:

• The search can fail silently. From our connection outside Colombia, every RUES search returned "No se encontraron resultados", including for a company that is active and in the open data. The page does not tell you the request was refused.
• Spanish only. There is no English interface, and legal forms, statuses, and field labels are all in Spanish.
• No financial statements in the RUES search. Companies that report to Supersociedades show up in its SIIS, though Ecopetrol S.A. itself did not. Other companies must deposit their statements at their chamber by law, and the chamber hands out copies one company at a time, at a cost.
• Proof is per company and paid. A certificate is cheap, but it is one company, one purchase, and one document at a time.
• The matrícula number is not permanent. The open data carries statuses for matrículas cancelled because of a change of domicile and new matrículas created by transfer, so the same company can appear under two chambers and two numbers.
• Bulk access is rationed. RUES report downloads need a stated reason and are only for merchants whose own matrícula was renewed on time. The detailed data with CSV and TXT downloads is for public officials.
• The open data is monthly and thin. It is the official bulk source, but it has no address, contact, or financial fields, it leaves out commercial establishments, and it includes millions of cancelled records alongside more than a dozen different status values.

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

7. Access RUES data programmatically

CompanyData maintains a normalized database of all 3,592,700 Colombian entities, sourced directly from the Registro Mercantil as synchronised in the RUES and refreshed as new entries and filings appear. NITs are already parsed and validated, and records are enriched with revenue, employees, and contact data that the free RUES basic data and the open data do not include.

Our Company Data API lets you look up any Colombian entity by NIT, name, or address and get structured JSON back in real time, with 150 free lookups to start and no Spanish-only portal in between. It is used by developers, banks, and insurers across 190+ countries, so Colombian checks work exactly like checks anywhere else.

GET /v1/companies?country=CO&registration_id=899999068

{
  "name": "Ecopetrol S.A.",
  "registration_id": "899999068"
}

We could not pull Ecopetrol's record from the RUES search itself, as section 2 explains, so the response above holds only the two values we searched the RUES for: the company name and NIT 899999068. Confecámaras' open data lists the same company as ECOPETROL S A under that NIT. Revenue, employees, and contact details come back on the same record where we hold them, and are left out here because neither the free RUES basic data nor the open data includes them.

8. Colombia vs other company registers

Colombia is generous on paper, with free basic data by law and monthly open data, and weaker on a portal that works for everyone and on financials, which sit outside the RUES search. For context: