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How to Search the German Corporate Registry (Handelsregister)

9 June 2026

Max Maddocks

The Handelsregister is Germany's official public register of companies. It serves as the authoritative reference for anyone dealing with, or investigating, a German business. Its website allows searches by name of a company or registration number.

Aside from companies, the database also contains information on registered associations (eingetragene Vereine, e.V.), a legal form used by voluntary associations such as sports clubs, social clubs, charitable organisations etc.

What kind of information is available in the registry database?

Depending on the age of the company, there are two or three different extracts available:

These documents are only available in German. However, since they follow a fixed format, it is possible to glean useful information from them even if you do not speak the language.

Current Extract (AD, Aktueller Abdruck)

As the name suggests, this document shows the current information for a company, including:

• full legal name of the company, including its legal form (e.g. GmbH, AG, UG etc.)
• register number and register court
• registered address
• registered activities / nature of business
• share capital
• current Managing Directors, Authorised Signatories or Liquidators (including their date of birth and city of residence)

As you will have noticed, the date of incorporation is not made available in the current extract. For that one needs to retrieve the chronological extract or (where the company was incorporated before 2002/2003) the historical extract.

Chronological Extract (CD, Chronologischer Abdruck)

The chronological extract covers all historic changes from 2002/2003 (or the company's incorporation date if later than that) until the present day. For older information, one needs to use the historical extract.

The chronological extract covers:

• changes in name
• changes in legal form
• changes in the nature of business
• changes in the registered address
• additions or deletions of managing directors, authorised signatories or liquidators
• insolvency/bankruptcy court decisions
• incorporation date (if incorporated after 2002/2003; otherwise this will be found in the historical extract)
• dissolution and deletion dates

Historical Extract (HD, Historischer Abdruck)

The historical extract includes all changes to the company information from the company's incorporation until 2002/2003, when the corporate registry digitised all company information and moved them to the CD format.

Shareholding information

As you will have noticed, the corporate registry extracts do not contain any information on the names of the shareholders of a company. Such information is normally available as a separate document within the DK (document view, Dokumentenansicht) section that can be reached by clicking on the DK link on the right side of the search results.

The document view normally contains documents such as articles of association, shareholder meeting minutes, as well as lists of shareholders. These lists can appear in various formats, as they are created and submitted by notaries who each have their own style.

If there is no shareholder list is available this might be due to one of two possibilities:

First, it may be the case that the company was incorporated before 2008 when submitting shareholding lists became mandatory. However, these are only mandatory where there has been a change in shareholders. So it may simply be the case that the shareholders of the company you are researching have not changed since 2008.

Second, it is possible that the company has recorded its shareholding and ownership structure already in the articles of association and no subsequent changes have taken place. In that case, you will need to check the articles of association.

Beneficial ownership register (transparency register)

Isn't there a beneficial ownership register in Germany that would make looking up the actual owners of a company easier? Yes, there is in fact a beneficial ownership register (Transparenzregister).

Moving registrations

Oftentimes, a company has moved cities at least once or even several times throughout over the course of its existence. In such cases, the company's registration is also usually moved to a new register court. In these cases, the CD or HD contain information on the company's previous or future company registration number and register court. This is crucial, as we regularly encounter companies that also changed their names at the same time as moving to a new city. The Handelsregister website allows for searches by registration number and register court.

Financial information

The Handelsregister website does not provide any financial statements or annual reports for companies. However, there is a second official German government website named Unternehmensregister (Company Register) that contains published financial statements and annual reports for companies registered in Germany.

For many companies, access to these statements and reports is free of charge. However, small companies are allowed to elect to make these statements only available behind a paywall (around €1 per statement).

We note that many small to medium-sized companies avail themselves of regulation allowing them to publish greatly-abbreviated statements that often do not contain any revenue figures or profit-or-loss statement.

What about searches by name of a director or shareholder?

The Handelsregister database does not, unfortunately, allow searches by name of a director or shareholder. However, such information can be triangulated through a mixture of third-party databases, company announcements in the official Gazette (Bundesanzeiger) and verification through retrieval of official records. We frequently help our clients with identifying directorships or shareholdings held by an individual as part of our enhanced due diligence work, so please get in touch if you have any questions about this.