registercheckby openlaw group
Understand the data

Data coverage

What is actually populated, measured against the production database.

Coverage is uneven, and the uneven parts are predictable. The figures below are counted directly against the production database, not estimated. They were last measured on 15 September 2026 against 5,796,418 company records.

Start here: active versus terminated

Half the register is historic. 2,932,047 records (50.6%) are companies whose register entry has been deleted — many of them decades old, entered when the register was digitised, and never accompanied by a filed extract.

If you quote a single coverage number you will quote the wrong one. Filter to active companies before judging coverage.

FieldAll 5.80M recordsActive companies only (2.86M)
Address41.6%75.9%
Founding date39.8%74.7%
Stated purpose36.3%71.3%
Share capital30.5%56.8%

Name, legal form, register court and register number are populated for essentially every record — those come from the register index and do not depend on a document being fetched.

Ownership and financials

These depend on a filing existing at all, so the ceiling is set by German law rather than by us.

DataActive companies with it
Shareholder data22.7% (649,529)
Financial reports29.8% (853,333)

A GmbH files a shareholder list; an AG does not. A company below the size thresholds files an abridged balance sheet; a sole trader files nothing. Most of the remaining 77% is not a gap we can close — it is data that was never required to exist.

Why a field is empty

Three different causes, and they are worth telling apart:

No document has been fetched. Around 3 million records, overwhelmingly terminated entries, have no register extract on file. There is nothing to extract from, and for a deleted entry the register usually has nothing to give either. Asking us to fetch one is what jobs will be for; they are not available yet.

The document is on file but the field was not extracted. Of the 2,795,875 companies that hold a register extract, 21.3% still have no address, 22.5% no founding date and 41.1% no capital. This is our extraction gap, and it is the one we are working on.

The field does not apply. No shareholder list for an AG, no capital for an e.K., no accounts for a company with no filing obligation.

Detecting which case you are in

If address, purpose and capital are all null on a company record, assume case 1 or 2 — no extract has been parsed. If some are populated and others are not, the missing ones are usually case 3.

Freshness

Register entries are re-read on a cycle rather than pushed to us by the courts. last_entry_date on the company record tells you when the register itself last recorded a change, which is the number to show your users.

Shareholdings are as fresh as the last filed list, which may be many years old — always read source_document_date alongside the figures. Financial reports appear 11–23 months after the fiscal year they cover, which is when the filing obligation falls due.

What we do not have

  • Beneficial owners. The Transparenzregister is not public data.
  • Shareholders of an AG. Not filed, so not available anywhere.
  • Trading addresses. The register holds the address for service, which is often a lawyer's or accountant's office.
  • Anything not filed with a German court. No credit scores, no trading history, no employee counts from the register itself.

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