Spanish Company Register: How to Search the Registro Mercantil and Verify Spanish Companies (2026)

1. How the Spanish company register works

Spain sits between Germany's fragmentation and the UK's single register. The Registro Mercantil is kept province by province by local registrars, so a business is registered where its seat is, identified by a provincial register and sheet number (hoja). But the registrars' association runs shared national portals on top, so in practice you search once, not fifty times.

Three layers matter: the Registradores portals (the free open-data directory and the paid registradores.org document service), the Registro Mercantil Central (rmc.es, the central name index, mainly used to reserve names), and BORME (boe.es), the official gazette that publishes every registration, appointment and dissolution daily, free, and the best tool for reconstructing a company's history.

The join key is the NIF (Número de Identificación Fiscal), format letter plus eight digits, for example B80759939. The letter encodes the legal form: B for an SL, A for an SA. Records also carry the EUID, the EU-wide register identifier that links Spanish entities into the European BRIS network.

2. How to search the Registro Mercantil step by step

The registrars' open-data directory is free and needs no registration. The interface is Spanish-only, but the fields are recognisable.

1. Open the Directorio de sociedades

   Go to the Registradores open-data portal and type the name. A search for "inditex" returns every match with its province, including the dissolved Madrid SL that has nothing to do with the Zara group.

   

2. Pick the right entity by province and form, not just name

   Names recur across provinces, and famous names attract copycats. When in doubt, match the NIF.

3. Open the record

   Free of charge you get the legal name, legal form, NIF, EUID, CNAE and NACE activity codes, the sheet number (hoja), the provincial register, website, status, and the current officers.

   

4. Order the nota informativa mercantil

   From €2.60, when you need the full extract: registered details, capital, powers of attorney, and the filing situation. A certified certificación (from €15) adds evidentiary value for banks and courts.

5. Check BORME for the history

   The free gazette archive at boe.es shows every published act, from appointments and capital increases to re-registrations and dissolutions, with dates, and is searchable by name.

3. What data is public and what it costs

Spain's model: the index is free, the documents are cheap but metered. Every paid item is ordered per business, per document.

Good news buried in there: unlike Switzerland, Spain does publish financial statements. Every registered entity deposits annual accounts with its provincial register. The friction is the retail model: one business, one year, one order, one fee.

4. Spanish legal forms, briefly

The suffix, and the first letter of the NIF, tells you the structure.

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

1. Confirm the registration

   Look the entity up in the free directory and match name, NIF, legal form and province against what you were given. Check the Estado field: "Liquidada" means wound up. For a quick first pass with revenue data included, use our free company lookup.

2. Verify the officers

   The free record lists administrators and their roles. Watch the role names: a liquidador means the entity is being wound up; an administrador único can bind it alone.

3. Order the nota and the accounts

   For anything contractual, spend the €2.60: the nota shows capital, powers and pending situations. Add the latest deposited accounts to see the balance sheet, and whether accounts are being deposited at all.

4. Read the BORME trail

   Search the name at boe.es: frequent officer changes, capital reductions or a recent seat move are the patterns worth questioning. Insolvency (concurso de acreedores) also surfaces here.

5. Cross-check the tax side

   For invoicing, validate the NIF as a VAT number via the EU's VIES service. A business can be registered yet deregistered for VAT, which matters for cross-border deals.

6. Limitations of the official register

For single checks, the Spanish setup is decent and cheap. The limits show at scale:

• Everything beyond the index is metered. Extracts and accounts are ordered per business, per year, per fee. Screening a portfolio of hundreds of suppliers means hundreds of small orders.
• Shareholders are not public. The register shows officers, not owners; the central UBO register is restricted to authorities, obliged entities and proven legitimate interest.
• No official API. The portals are built for manual lookups; there is no public programmatic access to the register.
• Spanish only. Records, notas and accounts are in Spanish and the regional co-official languages.
• Accounts lag. Deposits are due up to seven months after year end, so the newest figures can be well over a year old, and small entities file abridged formats.

One Spanish counterparty costs you ten minutes and €2.60. A market view of Spanish businesses, with revenue you can filter on, is where the official sources stop.

7. Access Spanish register data programmatically

There is no official Registro Mercantil API. The portals are built for humans ordering documents one at a time. CompanyData maintains records for all 5,428,173 Spanish businesses, sourced from the Registro Mercantil, BORME and other official sources, with NIF, CNAE codes, officers, and revenue and employee figures as structured fields you can filter on.

The Company Data API serves them by NIF, name or address, with free trial credits to start, and the same request works for 200+ other countries, from Companies House to the Handelsregister.

GET /api/company/search?nationalId=B80759939

{
  "name": "INDITEX MODA SL",
  "legalForm": "Sociedad de responsabilidad limitada",
  "nif": "B80759939",
  "city": "Madrid, Spain",
  "status": "Liquidated",
  "cnae": "4751 · Retail sale of textiles",
  "employees": "1 to 10",
  "revenueRange": "< €1M"
}

8. Spain vs other company registers

Spain lands in the European middle: free index, cheap paid documents, public accounts, private shareholders.