Germany Company Register: How to Search the Handelsregister and Verify German Companies (2026)

1. What is the German company register?

Germany does not have one company register. It has three systems that overlap, and knowing which one holds what saves you hours. The Handelsregister (commercial register) proves a company exists: legal form, directors, registered address, share capital. It is maintained by roughly 150 local district courts, with one shared search portal run by the federal states at handelsregister.de.

The Unternehmensregister (company register portal, unternehmensregister.de) aggregates the Handelsregister data and adds financial statements, insolvency notices, and Federal Gazette publications. The Transparenzregister holds beneficial ownership data, and since a European Court of Justice ruling in November 2022 it is no longer open to the general public.

A useful shorthand: the Handelsregister tells you a company exists, the Unternehmensregister tells you how it performs, and the Transparenzregister tells you who controls it.

2. How to search the Handelsregister step by step

Searching is free and requires no registration. The portal interface is available in English, though all documents are in German.

1. Open handelsregister.de

   Choose Normal Search or Advanced Search. Advanced Search adds filters for register type, court, and registration number, and returns a direct match if you know the number.

   

2. Enter the company name.

   Matching is exact, including German characters. If "Müller" returns nothing, try "Mueller". The same goes for ö/oe, ä/ae, and ß/ss. This is the most common reason a known company does not appear.

3. Filter by register type

   If needed: HRA for partnerships and sole traders, HRB for capital companies such as GmbH and AG (in plain terms: HRB is where limited companies live).

4. Open the company record.

   You see the company name, court of registration, Handelsregisternummer, and status (active or deleted), plus a list of available documents.

   

5. Download documents free.

   The most useful are the AD (Aktueller Ausdruck, current printout with directors and capital), the CD (Chronologischer Ausdruck, the full change history), and the DK (document collection with articles of association and GmbH shareholder lists).

3. What data is public and what it costs

Anyone can access the register without stating a reason. Since August 2022, nearly everything on the register side is free. Fees only appear for certified copies and some financial filings.

What you will not find in any German register: revenue figures, employee counts, industry codes, or contact details. The business purpose is a free-text field written by notaries, not a NACE or SIC code.

4. German legal forms, briefly

German law requires every company to carry its legal form in its name, so the suffix tells you the liability structure at a glance.

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

1. Confirm the registration

   Search handelsregister.de and match the exact name, legal form, court, and Handelsregisternummer against what the company gave you. Check the status field on the AD printout. For a quick first pass, our free company lookup finds the registration and revenue data in one search.

2. Check directors and signatories

   The AD lists managing directors (Geschäftsführer) and who may sign for the company. Verify the person you are dealing with is actually on it.

3. Pull the shareholder list

   For a GmbH, download the Gesellschafterliste from the DK collection. It shows direct owners and share amounts. If a shareholder is itself a company, repeat the lookup for that entity.

4. Review the change history

   The CD printout shows every change since registration. Watch for recent director swaps, capital changes, or relocations. Germany has an active shelf-company market, so the incorporation date alone says little about operational history.

5. Check financials and insolvency

   Search the Unternehmensregister for filed accounts (Rechnungslegungsunterlagen) and insolvency notices. No filings can mean reduced obligations for small companies, or late filing.

6. Limitations of the official register

To be clear: for a handful of lookups, the official portal is the right tool, and it costs nothing. The limits appear when you need scale, structure, or English:

• No API. There is no official programmatic access, and the portal's terms cap usage at 60 queries per hour. Mass automated scraping can even be a criminal offence under German law.
• German only. The interface speaks English, but every document, filing, and financial statement is in German.
• Fragmented across ~150 courts. No single national identifier exists. A company that relocates gets a new number at the new court, creating duplicate entries.
• PDFs, not data. Shareholder lists and articles are scanned documents. Extracting fields means OCR work.
• No firmographics. Revenue, employees, and industry codes are simply not in the register.

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

7. Access Handelsregister data programmatically

CompanyData maintains a normalized database of all 6,752,336 German legal entities, sourced directly from the Handelsregister and Bundesanzeiger and refreshed as new filings appear. The court-specific identifiers are already reconciled, scanned filings are parsed into structured fields, and records are enriched with revenue, employees, and industry codes that the official register does not publish.

The Handelsregister API lets you look up any German entity by HRB/HRA number, name, or address and get structured JSON back in real time, with 150 free lookups to start. It is part of our global Company Data API, used by developers, banks, and insurers, so German checks work exactly like checks in any of 200+ other countries.

GET /v1/companies?country=DE&registration_id=80333B42243

{
  "name": "Bayerische Motoren Werke AG",
  "legal_form": "AG",
  "registration_id": "80333B42243",
  "city": "München",
  "status": "active",
  "revenue_eur": 142380000000,
  "employees": 157110
}

8. Germany vs other company registers

Germany publishes more than most countries but is harder to work with than any register with a central database. For context: