Slovakia Company Register: How to Search the ORSR and Verify Slovak Companies (2026)

1. What is the Slovak company register?

Slovakia's register is a court register, but not a fragmented one. The Business Register of the Slovak Republic, in Slovak the Obchodný register Slovenskej republiky (ORSR), is kept in electronic form by eight registry courts, one for each regional court district: the City Courts Bratislava III and Košice, and the District Courts in Banská Bystrica, Nitra, Prešov, Trenčín, Trnava, and Žilina. The Ministry of Justice administers and operates the register as one information system, and a single search covers all eight courts. Limited companies founded the simplified way, through the online form, are all registered in Žilina, wherever their seat is.

The legal basis is new. On 17 August 2026 the Business Register Act, Act No. 29/2026 Coll., replaced the previous act, No. 530/2003 Coll., and everything registered under the old rules carried over. The new act also renamed the document archive from the collection of deeds (zbierka listín) to the collection of documents (zbierka dokumentov), so you will meet both names. Annual accounts are not filed with the courts directly. Companies file them electronically through the Financial Administration portal into the Register of Financial Statements (Register účtovných závierok, RÚZ), administered by the Ministry of Finance, which passes the accounts, annual reports, and audit reports into the company's collection of documents automatically.

In short: the Business Register tells you a company exists, who runs it, and who may sign for it. The collection of documents holds the paperwork behind each entry. The Register of Financial Statements tells you how the company performs.

2. How to search the ORSR step by step

Searching is free and needs no registration. Two front ends sit on the same data. The legacy portal, Business Register on Internet at orsr.sk, runs in Slovak and English. The Ministry's newer portal at sluzby.orsr.sk, which every legacy record links to as "View on the new portal", adds document downloads, a button to request a legally binding extract, and a subscription to changes.

1. Open Business Register on Internet

   Switch to English at the top. There are five ways in: business name, identification number, registered seat, registration number (the file reference), and name of a person. The person search finds the companies in which someone is a statutory representative, partner, proxy, supervisory board member, or liquidator, and untick "in actual records only" to include past roles. It is free as well.

   

2. Search by IČO when you have one

   Type the eight digits with or without spaces: the search ignores everything except numbers. You normally get one hit. You can get more than one if the company was kept by more than one registry court during its history, so check the court on each line.

3. Search by name with the right options

   The name search ignores diacritics, spaces, and punctuation, and by default matches from the start of the name. Tick "string anywhere in the name" for a fragment, and untick "in actual records only" to find a company that has been deleted or has changed its name since. The legal form and court dropdowns cut the noise on common names.

4. Open the extract

   Each hit offers two views and a document list. Actual shows the entries valid today, each with the date it took effect. Full adds every historical entry, marked in a different colour. The record gives you the business name, registered seat, IČO, date of entry, legal form, objects of the company, board, manner of acting, supervisory board, capital, shares, and any mergers, with no paywall anywhere.

   

5. Read the dates the American way

   The English interface writes dates as month/day/year. SLOVNAFT's date of entry reads 05/01/1992, which is 1 May 1992, not 5 January. The Slovak interface and the new portal write day.month.year.

6. Download the documents from the new portal

   Follow "View on the new portal" and open List of documents. For SLOVNAFT it lists 270 documents, from the 2025 annual report back to accounts for 2001, each marked as available electronically or not. Documents available electronically have a Download link, and each download first asks you to type the text from an image, a CAPTCHA. The legacy portal shows the same list without downloads.

3. What data is public and what it costs

Slovakia gives almost everything away. Reading the register, downloading what the collection of documents holds electronically, and requesting a legally usable electronic extract all cost nothing. Fees only apply to paper documents and to inspecting the register at the court, and they are set in the Court Fees Act (Act No. 71/1992 Coll.), not by the portal.

Two things stand out. First, the legal value of the free data changed in August 2026. The new act says registered data and documents published online are free and usable for legal purposes, and the registry court issues an electronic extract, sealed with a qualified electronic seal, without delay and at no charge. The portals still label their screens as indicative: the legacy extract and the new portal's full extract both say they are not applicable for legal acts. So when a bank or a court needs proof, request the sealed electronic extract instead of printing the screen. Second, financial statements are free in the Register of Financial Statements, for statements drawn up as of 31 December 2013 and later.

What you will not find in the business register: revenue, employee counts, statistical activity codes, or contact details. The objects of the company are free text in Slovak, exactly as the company wrote them. SK NACE codes appear in the Register of Financial Statements, which takes them from the Statistical Office's register of organisations, and the RÚZ record also shows the tax number (DIČ).

4. Slovak legal forms, briefly

The Commercial Code (Obchodný zákonník, Act No. 513/1991 Coll.) defines the company forms, and the register files companies in sections by legal form. The section is the first part of every file reference, so if a reference starts with Sro, you know you are looking at a private limited company before you open the record.

Sole traders are the gap. The 2026 act lists legal persons, state enterprises, and branches as the persons it enters, and no natural persons. The legacy search still has a Firm section and a "self-employed individual" filter, but self-employed people with a trade licence are searched in the Trade Register (Živnostenský register) of the Ministry of the Interior instead.

One practical point for matching: the legal form is part of the business name and may be written with or without spaces, such as s.r.o., s. r. o., or spol. s r.o. Normalise the suffix before you compare your own lists against the register. The name search itself ignores spaces and punctuation, which helps.

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

1. Confirm the IČO, the seat, and the court

   Search the IČO on the ORSR and check that the name, legal form, registered seat, and file reference match what you were given. The register records entry into liquidation, bankruptcy, restructuring, and forced administration, and the legacy extract only shows a heading when there is data under it, so scan for those headings rather than for an empty field. For a quick first pass, our free company lookup finds the registration and revenue data in one search.

2. Check who may sign

   Find the line "Acting in the name of the company". SLOVNAFT's says, in Slovak, that any two members of the board act jointly, so one director's signature is not enough. Each board member also carries the date the function began, which should predate your contract.

3. Check the owners where the register shows them

   For an s.r.o., the record lists every partner with the amount of each contribution and how much of it is paid up. For an a.s., a shareholder is named only when there is a sole shareholder. Beneficial owners are recorded but excluded from publication, so the register cannot answer the beneficial ownership question for you.

4. Read the full extract and the other legal facts

   Switch to the Full extract to see former names, seats, and directors with the dates they changed. Then read "Other legal facts". SLOVNAFT's records the 2019 extraordinary general meeting decision approving the transfer of the shares of all remaining shareholders to MOL Nyrt. in a squeeze-out, an ownership event the shares block alone does not show.

5. Pull the accounts from the Register of Financial Statements

   Search the IČO on registeruz.sk and open the latest financial statements. Check the filing date as well as the figures, because a missing year is itself a signal. SLOVNAFT filed its 2025 statements on 30 June 2026, and they appeared in its collection of documents on 18 July 2026.

6. Request a sealed extract for your file

   If the check has to stand up later, use "Request a legally binding extract" on the new portal. The electronic extract is free, sealed with a qualified electronic seal, and issued without delay, but the service asks you to sign in first. Once signed in, you can also subscribe to changes on the record.

6. Limitations of the official register

To be clear: for a handful of lookups, the ORSR is free, fast, and generous with directors and owners. The limits show up when you need English, figures, or scale:

• English stops at the labels. Field names are translated, but the objects of the company, the other legal facts, and the document titles stay in Slovak. On the new portal even the legal form appears in Slovak, and so does a foreign branch's legal form on the legacy portal.
• No revenue, staff counts, or contact data. The register holds identity and legal status. Figures live in the Register of Financial Statements, and large IFRS filers such as SLOVNAFT publish their accounts there only as PDF attachments, not as structured data.
• No activity codes. Objects of the company are free text, one line per activity, in whatever wording the company chose. SLOVNAFT's record lists dozens of them.
• Exact-match searches. The person search needs the surname exactly as registered, diacritics included, and the seat search needs the exact street and municipality. Only the name and IČO searches are forgiving.
• No beneficial owners. The register records them, but the act excludes them from publication and from issued extracts. Birth numbers and home addresses are not published either.
• Old paper stays paper. Documents filed on paper up to 31 December 2006 stay in paper form at the court unless someone requests a copy electronically, and paper filings from January to July 2007 are only due to be digitised by 30 June 2027.
• Not real time. The online databases are usually updated every working day, and the court has two working days to register a complete application in the first place.
• Built for one company at a time. The legacy portal offers no export of a result list, and the new portal asks for a CAPTCHA before every single document download. The free official API helps, but it returns the register record and the list of documents, not the documents themselves or any financial figures.

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

7. Access ORSR data programmatically

Slovakia is unusual here: the state already gives you a free API. The 2026 act requires the Ministry of Justice to publish register data as structured, machine-readable data free of charge, and its Open Data REST API offers four services: search, current extract, full extract, and the list of documents. Our test search by IČO returned SLOVNAFT, a.s. without an API key. Financial statements have their own RÚZ Open API, in JSON, under a CC0 licence.

What neither API does for you: join the two systems into one record, translate the Slovak free text, turn PDF-only accounts into figures, or add data neither register publishes, such as phone numbers and email addresses.

CompanyData maintains a normalized database of all 1,200,113 Slovak entities, sourced directly from the Business Register and the Register of Financial Statements and refreshed as new entries and filings appear. IČO numbers are already parsed and validated, and records are enriched with revenue, employees, industry codes, and contact data that the official register does not publish.

Our Company Data API lets you look up any Slovak entity by IČO, name, or address and get structured JSON back in real time, with 150 free lookups to start. It is used by developers, banks, and insurers across 190+ countries, so Slovak checks work exactly like checks anywhere else.

GET /v1/companies?country=SK&registration_id=31322832

{
  "name": "SLOVNAFT, a.s.",
  "legal_form": "a.s.",
  "registration_id": "31 322 832",
  "city": "Bratislava",
  "start_date": "1992-05-01"
}

Every field above is what the free ORSR extract shows for SLOVNAFT: the business name with its a.s. legal form, the IČO, the registered seat in Bratislava, and the date of entry, 1 May 1992. Revenue, employees, and contact details come back on the same record where we hold them, and are absent here for the reason this guide keeps running into: the Slovak register does not publish them.

8. Slovakia vs other company registers

Slovakia gives a lot away: free search, free sealed electronic extracts, free accounts, and a free official API. What it does not give away is content in English. For context: