Denmark Company Register: How to Search the CVR and Verify Danish Companies (2026)

1. What is the Danish company register?

The CVR, in Danish Det Centrale Virksomhedsregister and in English the Central Business Register, is the Danish state's master register of businesses. Since 1999 it has been the authoritative source of current and historical basic data on every registered business in Denmark, and since 2018 it covers Greenland too. Associations and public authorities are in it as well. The data comes from the businesses' own registrations on Virk (virk.dk), and the register is owned and kept by the Danish Business Authority under the CVR Act (lov om Det Centrale Virksomhedsregister).

What sets Denmark apart is how much sits on a single record. Where Belgium splits its register, its gazette, and its annual accounts across three institutions, the CVR record carries the registration, the official notices published about the company in the Registreringstidende (going back no further than 1986), and the filed annual reports, all under one number. The CVR Act states the principle plainly: anyone may access the basic data in the register, with a few exceptions such as personal identity numbers. One thing the record does not tell you is whether the company is VAT-registered: its VAT line links to the tax authority's search instead.

In short: the CVR tells you a company exists, who runs it, who may sign for it, and how many people it employs, and it hands you the annual report. The tax authority tells you whether it charges VAT.

2. How to search the CVR step by step

Searching is free and needs no login. The site runs in Danish, English, and Greenlandic (Kalaallisut). Be realistic about the English version: it translates navigation and field labels, but the CVR itself warns that you will still meet a lot of Danish content. Legal forms, industry code descriptions, the objects clause, and the signing rule all stay in Danish.

1. Open the CVR search

   Go to datacvr.virk.dk. There is a single search field that accepts a CVR number, a company name, a person's name, a P-number, or an address. Switch to English from the links top right if you prefer.

   

2. Search by CVR number when you have one

   A CVR number takes you straight to the company record, with no result list in between. Searching 22756214, for example, opens the record for A.P. Møller - Mærsk A/S directly.

3. Search by name with the Danish spelling

   Search for the name as it is registered, which is often the Danish spelling, because common words return huge lists. In our test, "Maersk" returned 1,236 hits, almost all of them subsidiaries, while the parent company is registered as A.P. Møller - Mærsk A/S. Put a * anywhere in a word to widen the search, and put quotes around words to match them exactly. The search engine does not understand questions, so type names, numbers, or addresses.

4. Narrow it down with the filters

   Click Afgræns søgning ("Filter" in English) to filter by legal form, status, number of employees, advertising protection, business marker, municipality, region, person role, industry, and start or cessation date. You can leave the search field empty and use filters alone: the register's own example is every active A/S with 10-19 employees in Region Syddanmark. Results download to Excel, up to 3,000 entities at a time.

5. Open the company record

   The top block gives you the CVR number, address, postcode and city, start date, legal form (Virksomhedsform), advertising protection (Reklamebeskyttelse), and status. The record itself is free and needs no login. Of the data on it, only the beneficial owners sit behind one.

   

6. Expand the bars below the record

   Udvidede virksomhedsoplysninger adds the phone number, municipality, industry codes, secondary names, objects clause, financial year, and registered capital. Tegningsregel, personkreds og revisor holds the signing rule, the management, the board, and the auditor. Ejerforhold lists the legal owners with at least 5% of the capital or votes, while its beneficial-owner part stays hidden unless you log in with approved access. Further down sit the annual reports, the P-units, the registration history, the historical master data, and the monthly employee counts.

3. What data is public and what it costs

Denmark is the rare register where the price list mostly says zero. The rule, in the CVR's own prices and delivery page, is that documents and services which involve no manual processing are free. Money only changes hands when an employee of the Danish Business Authority has to handle a document. Those fees are exempt from VAT and have applied since 5 December 2014.

Standard orders are, as a rule, handled within 10 working days. Express orders placed on a weekday before 13:00 are normally handled the same day. Documents go out by email, and physically signed ones are also sent as a paper copy.

Two things are worth pulling out of that table. Denmark publishes annual reports free and machine-readable: every company files with the Danish Business Authority, digital filings come out as XBRL and PDF, and the PDF is the legally valid version. And the record publishes people. Under the CVR Act, the names of fully liable partners, founders, owners, and management are published at all times and, unless they have address protection, their addresses until five years after they leave. CPR numbers, the Danish personal identity numbers, are never passed to private parties.

What you will not find on the record: revenue or profit as fields (they are in the annual report, not the register data), VAT status (the record's VAT line simply links to skat.dk), and, since 1 September 2025, beneficial owners, unless you log in and qualify for access. Contact data is a different story. The Maersk record shows a phone number, but a company can mark itself as advertising-protected, and that changes what you may do with it.

4. Danish legal forms, briefly

The CVR's legal-form filter lists more than 40 business types, because the register holds far more than companies: municipalities, regions, state agencies, associations, foreign branches, estates, and trusts all get a CVR number. For commercial counterparties, the list comes down to the forms below.

When you match a supplier list against the register, expect the full Danish form in one place and the abbreviation in another. Maersk's record shows Aktieselskab as the legal form while the company name itself ends in A/S. And an old contract with an IVS is not a sign of fraud: the form was abolished, and the law required existing ones to decide by 15 October 2021 to re-register as an ApS.

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

1. Confirm the CVR number and read the status properly

   Search the number and check that the name, address, and legal form match what you were given. Then read the status itself, not just whether the company counts as active. The register files Under konkurs (bankruptcy), Under frivillig likvidation (voluntary liquidation), Under rekonstruktion (reconstruction), and Under tvangsopløsning (compulsory dissolution) under active companies, next to Normal, the status Maersk shows. For a quick first pass, our free company lookup finds the registration and revenue data in one search.

2. Check who may sign

   Open Tegningsregel, personkreds og revisor. The signing rule says who can bind the company and whether they must act jointly. Maersk is bound by the chair of the board together with a vice-chair, or by two members of the management together, among other combinations. Check that the person signing your contract is listed and can sign in the way they are proposing to.

3. Read the history

   Registreringshistorik lists every notice published about the company in the Registreringstidende, going back no further than 1986: changes of management, board, auditor, capital, financial year, and registered office. Historiske stamdata shows former names, addresses, and industries. Maersk was registered as AKTIESELSKABET DAMPSKIBSSELSKABET SVENDBORG until 11 June 2003. A cluster of changes shortly before your deal is worth asking about.

4. Download the latest annual report

   Open Regnskaber and download the most recent report, free. Check the publication date as well as the figures, because a late filing is itself a signal, and check that the auditor named in the report matches the one on the record.

5. Check VAT at the tax authority

   The CVR does not tell you whether a company is VAT-registered. Use the tax authority's VAT number check, which takes a CVR or SE number. For EU trade, check the VAT number in the EU's VIES service: Maersk's, DK22756214, returns A.P. MØLLER - MÆRSK A/S as valid.

6. Check the site and the headcount

   If you deal with a branch or a warehouse, open the P-units and check that the address is registered to this company. Then look at the employee counts: they come from the company's own payroll reporting to the tax authority's eIndkomst system. The record for A.P. Møller - Mærsk A/S showed 2 employees for July 2026, so a small number on a parent company is not by itself a warning sign.

6. Limitations of the official register

To be clear: for a handful of lookups, the CVR gives you almost everything on one free record. The limits show up when you need ownership, scale, or data in English:

• Beneficial owners are no longer public. Since 1 September 2025 the CVR shows beneficial owners only to competent authorities, entities with anti-money-laundering obligations, and people with a legitimate interest. You log in with MitID, state your category in a sworn declaration, and get a certificate valid for three years. The Danish Business Authority's guidance confirms that everything else stays visible without a login.
• The free API comes with paperwork. System-to-system access is free, but you apply by form and user creation normally takes three weeks. Underneath is an Elasticsearch 6.8.23 endpoint, and the Danish Business Authority gives no support on using it. The separate CVR web services need an OCES3 certificate from MitID Erhverv and signed documents first.
• English labels, Danish content. Legal forms, industry descriptions, and signing rules stay in Danish. Annual reports are Danish by default, and filing in English has only been possible since 1 January 2014.
• No financial fields. Revenue and profit live in the annual reports, so turning them into numbers means reading XBRL or PDF one company at a time, or running the separate accounts feed.
• Industry codes changed in 2025. Danish Industry Code DB25 replaced DB07 in the CVR on 1 January 2025, so any time series on industry codes crosses a classification break.
• Advertising protection restricts use. A company marked Reklamebeskyttelse: Ja may not have its register data used by private businesses for direct marketing, and anyone passing on its contact data must say so.
• Exports stop at 3,000. The web search downloads at most 3,000 entities to Excel. Anything bigger means one of the system-to-system routes.

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

7. Access CVR data programmatically

CompanyData maintains a normalized database of all 956,685 Danish entities, sourced directly from the CVR and the annual reports filed with the Danish Business Authority, and refreshed as new registrations and filings appear.

The CVR API lets you look up any Danish entity by CVR number, name, or address and get structured JSON back in real time, with 150 free lookups to start and no access form to file first. It is part of our global Company Data API, used by developers, banks, and insurers across 190+ countries, so Danish checks work exactly like checks anywhere else.

GET /v1/companies?country=DK&registration_id=22756214

{
  "name": "A.P. Møller - Mærsk A/S",
  "legal_form": "Aktieselskab",
  "registration_id": "22756214",
  "city": "København K",
  "status": "Normal"
}

Every field above is what the free CVR record for Maersk shows. Revenue and other figures from the annual reports come back on the same record where we hold them, and are absent here for a simple reason: the CVR record itself carries no turnover or profit figures. They sit in the filed reports.

8. Denmark vs other company registers

Denmark gives away more for free than most registers in this table, and asks for paperwork rather than money when you want the data by machine. For context: