Portugal Company Register: How to Search the Registo Comercial and Verify Portuguese Companies (2026)

1. What is the Portuguese company register?

Portugal's Registo Comercial, the commercial register, exists to make the legal situation of businesses public so that others can trade with them safely. The Commercial Register Code (Código do Registo Comercial, Decree-Law 403/86) covers sole traders, commercial companies, civil companies in commercial form, and the limited-liability sole-trader vehicle known as the EIRL. It also governs the registration of cooperatives, public enterprises, complementary groupings of companies (ACE), and European Economic Interest Groupings. For a commercial company, registration is what gives it legal personality, and mandatory registrations must be requested within two months of the act.

The work is done by the commercial registry offices (conservatórias do registo comercial), which are external services of the Instituto dos Registos e do Notariado (IRN) under the Ministry of Justice. Their jurisdiction has no geographical limits, so any office can handle a company from anywhere in the country. Alongside them, the Registo Nacional de Pessoas Coletivas (RNPC, the National Register of Legal Persons) runs the central file of legal persons, decides whether a proposed company name is admissible, and assigns the identification number.

In short: the publications tell you what a company has registered, the certidão permanente tells you its current legal state, and the accounts certificate tells you how it performs. Of those three, only the publications are free for everyone.

2. How to search the Registo Comercial step by step

Here is the honest version. When we tried to look up Galp through the IRN's services, no free search by name returned a record: the certificate service starts from an access code, and without one you have to order a certidão permanente, which costs money. Searching what a company has published is free, and that is where most checks should start.

1. Search the publications by NIPC or name

   Open the publications search of the Ministry of Justice. It takes a NIPC, which the form marks as the preferred criterion, or an entity name, and you can narrow the search by district, municipality, date range, and type of publication. The search runs a Google reCAPTCHA check before it returns results.

2. Read what was published

   For private and public limited companies and partnerships limited by shares, most registered facts are published: the incorporation, appointments and departures of directors and supervisory board members, a move of the registered office, capital changes, mergers, and any other amendment of the articles. One gap matters: transfers of quotas in a private limited company are registered but not published, so a change in who holds a Lda.'s quotas does not show up here.

3. Open the IRN's certificate consultation

   The record itself is behind the Consulta de Certidão Permanente. The service explains what it does, then walks you through two more steps: identifying the certificate, and viewing the data. Everything after the start button depends on the certificate's access code, and the service offers no search by company name.

   

4. No code? Order a certidão permanente

   Anyone can order a certificate on any company. The gov.pt service page lists what you need: your name, a tax number (NIF or NIPC), and an email address for the access code, plus a mobile number if you want an SMS. You pay by Multibanco or by Visa or Mastercard, and the certificate becomes available once the payment is confirmed. The English version takes up to three working days.

5. Read the certificate

   There are three types: the registrations alone, the registrations with the documents they were based on, and the latest updated articles of association. Whichever you order, the information stays up to date for as long as the certificate runs, and it also shows registration requests that are still pending.

3. What data is public and what it costs

Portugal makes the record cheap but almost never free. The fees are set in law, in the Registries and Notary Fees Regulation (Regulamento Emolumentar dos Registos e Notariado). The decree that approved it (Decree-Law 322-A/2001) also lets the IRN agree specific amounts and payment terms for certificate requests by protocol, so the table below shows the standard fees.

Two things are worth pulling out of that table. First, the annual accounts have their own certificate, separate from the certidão permanente. Companies deposit them electronically on official forms, by the 15th day of the seventh month after the financial year ends, which is 15 July for a calendar year. The accounts certificate is a separate paid subscription with its own 12-digit code, and each consultation asks for the year the accounts relate to. Second, the €25 to €70 scale is the fee for the online certificate service. Portugal's own page on the EU e-Justice Portal adds that the cost can vary with the type of certificate you order.

What the official descriptions of the record do not mention at all: phone numbers, email addresses, employee counts, or revenue as a field you can search on. The register is a legal-status system. Financial figures exist, but as deposited accounts behind a second purchase, one company and one year at a time.

4. Portuguese legal forms, briefly

The Companies Code (Código das Sociedades Comerciais, Decree-Law 262/86) allows five types of commercial company, and for most of them the name has to say which type it is. That makes the suffix the fastest way to read a Portuguese company name.

Cooperatives, public enterprises, ACE groupings, and EEIGs go into the same commercial register. If you are matching a supplier list against it, normalise the suffix first: the law lets a company end its name with Limitada or Lda., and with Sociedade Anónima or S.A., so treat each pair as the same thing.

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

1. Confirm the NIPC and the name

   Check that the number has nine digits and starts with 5, 6, 8, or 9, then search it on the publications site and check that the name and its legal-form suffix match what you were given. For a quick first pass, our free company lookup finds the registration and revenue data in one search.

2. Get the certidão permanente

   Ask the company for its access code, or buy a certificate yourself for €25. Check the legal form, registered office, and object against your contract, and look at the pending registration requests the certificate shows. A pending change of seat or board is worth asking about.

3. Check who may sign

   The register records who signs for the company and who sits on its corporate bodies. Entries made by transcription carry a legal presumption that the situation exists as recorded. Entries made by simple deposit are only a public notice with no presumption of correctness, so treat them as a pointer rather than proof.

4. Read the recent publications

   Run the NIPC through the publications search for the last two or three years. For a Lda. or an S.A., board changes, a move of registered office, capital changes, and mergers all appear here, and a fact that must be published only takes effect against third parties from the date of publication.

5. Search for insolvency proceedings

   Search the NIPC or the name, with a date range, in the Citius insolvency publicity search. It is free and open to anyone, and covers insolvency, the special revitalisation process (PER), payment-agreement proceedings (PEAP), and the extraordinary viability process (PEVE).

6. Pull the latest annual accounts

   Order the accounts certificate and check which year it covers. A company with a calendar financial year should have filed by 15 July of the following year. Under the Companies Code it must also make its management report, the statutory auditor's certification, and any supervisory board opinion available free on its website, if it has one, and at its registered office.

6. Limitations of the official register

To be clear: for a handful of checks, Portugal's register is cheap and its certificates carry real legal weight. The limits appear when you need scale, speed, or a look at the record without paying for it:

• No free record lookup. The register's own data is read through a certidão permanente, at €25 a year per company unless someone shares a code with you.
• No name search on the certificate service. The IRN consultation starts from an access code. The name searches we found are on the publications site and on Citius, and neither returns the register record itself.
• A CAPTCHA on the free search. The publications search runs Google reCAPTCHA when you submit it, which is built to stop automated queries.
• Accounts are a second purchase. Filed accounts sit behind their own subscription and code, separate from the certidão permanente.
• Built around Portuguese identifiers. The certificate order form's tax number field (NIF or NIPC) accepts nine digits only, although the form does not mark it as required, and its SMS alerts do not work on foreign mobile networks. Payment is by Multibanco, Visa, or Mastercard.
• English costs time. Only the registration certificate is offered in English, and it is ready up to three working days after payment.
• No public bulk access. Online access to and copies of the central file of legal persons can only be authorised for entities the law lists, such as public services, private bodies notably in the financial sector, those involved in forming legal persons, judges, prosecutors, and insolvency administrators, and each needs a protocol with the IRN.
• Ownership changes stay quiet. Quota transfers in a Lda. are registered but excluded from the mandatory publications.
• Online publications start in 2006. The online system covers all companies from 1 January 2006, and Empresa na Hora companies from July 2005. Before that, company acts were published in the III Série of the Diário da República.

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

7. Access Registo Comercial data programmatically

CompanyData maintains a normalized database of all 849,176 Portuguese entities, refreshed as new filings appear. Records are enriched with revenue, employees, industry codes, and contact data that the official register does not publish as searchable fields.

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

GET /v1/companies?country=PT&name=Galp

We show the request only. Our attempt to pull Galp's record from the official register stopped at the access code, so there is no register-verified value to put in a sample response, and we would rather print none than invent one. Run the query yourself to see the full record.

8. Portugal vs other company registers

Portugal keeps its record cheap but paid, and puts the free part, the publications, behind a CAPTCHA. For context: