France Company Register: How to Search the RNE, Infogreffe and Sirene (2026)

1. What is the French company register?

France used to keep businesses in three different books depending on what they did: the national trade and companies register for commercial firms, the Répertoire des métiers for craft trades, and the Registre des actifs agricoles for farming. The PACTE law of 22 May 2019 abolished that split. On 1 January 2023 the Registre National des Entreprises took over as a single dematerialised register, operated by INPI and fed automatically by the Guichet unique, the portal through which every business formality now passes.

That solved one problem and left another. The RNE is the register, but the identifying number comes from elsewhere: INSEE, the national statistics institute, which runs the Sirene directory and issues every business its SIREN. And the RCS, kept by the registrars of the commercial courts, still exists underneath, and is still where the official Kbis extract and the filed documents come from through Infogreffe. Three systems, three websites, one company.

2. How to search the French register step by step

Anyone may consult the public data of the RNE, and it costs nothing. Which system you start from depends on what you are trying to learn.

1. Open data.inpi.fr for the register record

   The single search field takes a name, a SIREN, a denomination, or the name of a representative. The footnote under the box confirms what you are searching: for businesses, the data comes from the Registre national des entreprises.

   

2. Read the record

   You get the identity of the business, its activity, its legal form, and its representatives, along with the deeds and accounts that have been filed. Advanced search narrows by the usual criteria when a name is too common.

3. Use the Annuaire des Entreprises for the Sirene view

   This is where the establishment structure lives: every SIRET, the activity code, the headcount band, and the status of each site. The old sirene.fr closed permanently on 2 December 2025 and its search moved here, so older bookmarks are dead.

4. Go to Infogreffe for anything official

   The Kbis extract is the document French counterparties and banks actually ask for. It carries the legal structure, the directors, the activity, the place of business, how the company operates, and whether insolvency proceedings have been opened.

5. Check the BODACC for announcements

   Incorporations, changes, disposals, and insolvency proceedings are all published in the official gazette, and it has been free since July 2011. It is the fastest way to see that something has happened without buying a document.

3. What data is public and what it costs

France is genuinely cheap. The register data is free, the APIs are free, and the documents are priced by regulated tariff, set for the registrars of the commercial courts by an order of 26 February 2026 and updated on 1 March 2026. Figures below include tax.

Now the line in that table that matters most. Certificate of deposit for confidentially filed accounts, EUR 3.06. French companies may file their annual accounts with a declaration of confidentiality, and when they do, the only thing anyone can buy is a certificate confirming that accounts were filed. Not the accounts. INPI puts the volume at roughly 1.5 million filings a year, of which about 45% carry that confidentiality declaration.

The honest summary of French financial disclosure: the filing rate is high, the price is low, and close to half of it is sealed. For the other half, INPI publishes the keyed figures from accounts filed since 1 January 2017 as structured JSON, free.

4. French legal forms, briefly

Since 2023 there are no register divisions to learn, because the RNE holds everyone. What differs is whether a business is also entered in the RCS at the commercial court, which decides whether there is a Kbis to buy. The RCS covers traders and commercial companies. Craft, agricultural, and independent activity sits in the RNE alone.

One practical consequence of the reform: the RNE registration certificate has replaced the Kbis in most administrative procedures. If someone is still asking for a Kbis, they may not have updated their paperwork.

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

1. Start from the SIREN

   Check the nine-digit SIREN against the name and address on data.inpi.fr. If you were given a fourteen-digit number, that is a SIRET and the first nine digits are the SIREN you want. For a quick first pass, our free company lookup finds the registration and revenue data in one search.

2. Confirm the establishment is active, not just the company

   In the Annuaire des Entreprises, check the specific SIRET you are dealing with. A company can be active while the branch that signed your contract is closed, and that only shows at SIRET level.

3. Buy the Kbis

   EUR 3.06 electronically. It gives the legal structure, the directors, the activity, where it is carried on, and whether insolvency proceedings have been opened. That last field is the reason to buy it rather than rely on a free record.

4. Look for the accounts, and expect to be blocked

   Search the filed accounts on INPI or buy the full copy from Infogreffe at EUR 9.08. If the company filed confidentially, the most you can get is the EUR 3.06 certificate of deposit confirming a filing happened. Roughly 45% of filings are in that category, so this is the normal outcome, not a red flag.

5. Read the articles of association for anything material

   EUR 9.08 electronically. For an SAS in particular this matters more than elsewhere, because the form deliberately leaves governance and the powers of the président to the statutes rather than to the law.

6. Check the BODACC and the insolvency status

   The gazette is free and shows recent announcements. For a definitive answer, the insolvency status from Infogreffe is EUR 4.30, and the full debt status EUR 58.46 if the exposure justifies it.

6. Limitations of the official register

To be clear: France has done more than almost any other country to open its register, and the 2023 reform was real. The limits that remain are specific:

• About 45% of annual accounts are confidential. Of roughly 1.5 million filings a year, close to half carry a declaration of confidentiality, and the register will sell you only a certificate that a filing took place.
• Three systems, still. The register is at INPI, the number is at INSEE, and the official documents are at Infogreffe. Any complete picture means querying all three and reconciling them.
• The Sirene API is capped at 30 queries a minute. Cursor pagination at 1,000 records a page makes that workable for bulk extraction, but it is a hard limit on per-company lookups.
• INPI provides no technical support. Its own documentation says so: the data is published, and loading and exploiting it is your problem.
• Deeds are PDFs. Around 28 million of them going back to 1993. Structured accounts exist only for filings since 2017, and only the non-confidential ones.
• Moving targets. sirene.fr closed for good on 2 December 2025, twelve commercial courts were renamed tribunaux des activités économiques in January 2025, and the RNE itself is three years old. French register documentation ages fast.
• No contact data. Phone numbers and email addresses are not register fields in any of the three systems, so the register tells you who runs a company but never how to reach them.

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

7. Access French register data programmatically

CompanyData maintains a normalized database of all 14,507,126 French businesses, sourced directly from the RNE, Sirene, and the RCS filings, and refreshed as new entries and filings appear. The SIREN is the company key with every SIRET attached to it rather than treated as a separate business, keyed figures from non-confidential accounts are parsed into structured financial fields, and records are enriched with revenue estimates, employees, and contact data that no French register publishes.

The Sirene API lets you look up any French business by SIREN, SIRET, name, or address and get one complete record back as JSON in real time, with 150 free lookups to start and no 30-per-minute ceiling. It is part of our global Company Data API, used by developers, banks, and insurers, so French checks work exactly like checks in any of 200+ other countries.

GET /v1/companies?country=FR&registration_id=542051180

{
  "name": "TOTALENERGIES SE",
  "legal_form": "Societe europeenne",
  "siren": "542051180",
  "siret_headquarters": "54205118000066",
  "city": "Courbevoie",
  "status": "active",
  "nace_code": "70.10Z",
  "capital_eur": 5704141785,
  "establishments_active": 3,
  "employee_band": "2000-4999"
}

One request, one record. The same job against the official systems means a call to Sirene for the establishments, a call to INPI for the register record and any non-confidential accounts, and a purchase from Infogreffe for the Kbis.

8. France vs other company registers

France is one of the few European countries offering free official APIs over its register, and the one that lets companies hide their accounts most easily. For context: