French Company Register Search — SIREN, NAF, Directors, Revenue

Search every company registered in France through the government's own open register. By name, by SIREN or SIRET, by department or postcode, by NAF activity, by legal form, by employee band, by filed revenue, or by a radius around a point on the map.

One source, live on every run, no API key and no scraping: recherche-entreprises.api.gouv.fr, the search API behind the official French company directory.

What a company row looks like

A direct SIREN lookup on 775665912:

Field	Value
siren, name	775665912 · CENTRE NATIONAL D'ETUDES SPATIALES (CNES)
status, dateCreated	Active · 1984-07-01
nafCode, nafLabel	72.19Z · Recherche-développement en autres sciences physiques et naturelles
nafSection, nafSectionLabel	M · Professional, scientific and technical activities
employeeRangeCode, employeeRange	51 · 2 000 to 4 999 employees
companyCategory	ETI
address, latitude, longitude	2 PLACE MAURICE QUENTIN 75001 PARIS · 48.861320 · 2.345357
establishmentCount	7
vatNumber	FR49775665912
annuaireUrl	annuaire-entreprises.data.gouv.fr/entreprise/775665912

A ceased company keeps its record. 552100554 comes back as PEUGEOT SA, status Ceased, dateClosed 2021-01-16, with the last accounts it filed: financialYear 2019, revenue 74 731 000 000, netResult 3 584 000 000.

Three codes translated

The register stores its three most useful fields as codes. A raw 03 or 10.71C is unusable in a prospect list, so each one is written back in readable form alongside the code it came from.

Employee band. tranche_effectif_salarie is an INSEE bracket code, not a headcount, and the codes are not ordinal — 03 is smaller than 11, and NN is not zero. The full INSEE table is applied: 01 is 1 to 2 employees, 02 is 3 to 5, 03 is 6 to 9, 11 is 10 to 19, 12 is 20 to 49, 21 is 50 to 99, up to 53 for 10 000 or more. NN means the company employed nobody during the reference year; 00 means it had nobody on 31 December but did employ people earlier in the year.

Activity. nafCode carries the NAF (APE) code and nafLabel the official INSEE sub-class wording — 10.71C is Boulangerie et boulangerie-pâtisserie, 62.01Z is Programmation informatique. All 732 NAF rév. 2 sub-classes are covered. nafSectionLabel gives the 21-section level in English.

Administrative state. A and C become Active and Ceased on companies. Establishments use a different pair — A and F — and become Open and Closed.

Filters

Every filter below was checked against the live register by comparing result counts and then reading the returned rows back, because the API silently ignores parameters it does not recognise.

Searching boulangerie across France returns at least 10 000 active companies. Add department 69 and it is 398. Add nafCode 10.71C and it is 292. Add employeeRange 03 and it is 51 — and all 15 rows pulled from that search carry nafCode 10.71C, nafLabel Boulangerie et boulangerie-pâtisserie, employeeRangeCode 03, employeeRange 6 to 9 employees and status Active.

department and postcode filter on establishments, not on the head office. One of those 15 bakeries has its registered office in department 59 and was returned because it runs a site in 69; the establishment rows show the site that matched. This is the register's own behaviour and it is usually what you want — a company with a branch in your territory is a prospect.

activeOnly is on by default and sends etat_administratif=A. Leaving it off does not mean "active first", it means both: a search for boulangerie in Corsica returns 103 companies with no state filter, 72 with A and 31 with C. Direct SIREN and SIRET lookups ignore the filters, so a ceased company you asked for by number is still returned.

minRevenue and maxRevenue filter on the latest filed turnover. Only companies that actually filed accounts can match, so these quietly exclude everything with no published figures.

Geographic search

Set latitude, longitude and radiusKm and the run switches to the register's radius endpoint. The radius runs from 0.001 km to 50 km. A 500-metre circle on Place Bellecour in Lyon returns 1 888 companies.

A company matches when any of its establishments falls inside the circle, so national chains come back with their head office far outside it — La Poste is returned for a 300-metre circle on the Hôtel de Ville in Paris because it has a counter there. Turn on includeEstablishments to see which site matched.

Geographic search accepts only the activity filters. Department, postcode, legal form, size and revenue are not supported by that endpoint and are dropped rather than silently ignored; the summary row lists what was actually sent.

Output

Four row types, all flat and camelCase, keyed together by siren.

summary — one per search, pushed before its results: totalResults, returned, duplicates, the filters actually sent, and a note when something needs explaining.

company — the company, with the head office address flattened into address, postcode, city, department, region and separate numeric latitude and longitude; the latest filed financialYear, revenue and netResult; establishment counts; the VAT number; and the public-registry flags that people filter on — isAssociation, isSocialEconomy, isEnvironmentCertified, isOrganicCertified, isQualiopiCertified, isMissionLedCompany, isWorkIntegrationEnterprise, isLivingHeritageCompany, hasCollectiveAgreement with collectiveAgreementIds, hasGenderEqualityIndex, hasGreenhouseGasReport.

director — optional, on by default. See below.

establishment — optional, off by default. The sites that matched the search, with SIRET, address, coordinates, trading names and open or closed state.

Directors and personal data

dirigeants is published French open data from the RNE, the national business register. It names real people in their business capacity, and this Actor treats it as such rather than as a people database.

Each director row carries the surname, first names, role, nationality and birthYear — nothing else. The API also returns date_de_naissance as YYYY-MM; it is dropped and never written to the dataset. The year is enough to tell two namesakes apart, which is the only thing a company register needs it for.

Corporate officers — auditors and parent companies — carry no personal data at all: they come back as directorType company with corporateName and corporateSiren.

The API also offers parameters that search for a named individual across all companies, with a birth-date range. They are deliberately not exposed by this Actor. This is a company search, not a person search, and there is no input that will make it behave like one.

If you keep or reuse director rows, you become the data controller for that personal data under the GDPR, including the purpose limitation and the right to object. Set includeDirectors to false if you do not need them.

How complete is the data

Measured on a run of eight broad national searches, 400 companies:

Field	Present
nafLabel	100%
employeeRange	100%
latitude / longitude	98%
at least one director	95%
companyCategory	95%
vatNumber	87%
financialYear with revenue and netResult	74%
revenue above zero	46%

finances is the patchy one and it gets patchier the smaller the company. Broad searches rank larger companies first, which is why the 74% above is optimistic; over a wider slice that reached further down the result pages, only 46% of companies carried a finances block at all. Sole traders, associations and recently created companies mostly file nothing. Never assume the field is there.

The latest filed year is not the same for everyone either — in that sample it ranged from 2025 back to 2016, so financialYear is always written next to the figures.

Limits

10 000 results per search, hard. The register stops counting at 10 000, so totalResults of 10 000 means "at least 10 000" and totalResultsCapped is set to true. It also refuses to page past that point — per_page is capped at 25 and page × per_page must not exceed 10 000. Narrowing by department, postcode or NAF code is the only way through, and the summary row says so.

tranche_effectif_salarie runs two to three years behind. That is how INSEE publishes it. employeeRangeYear says which year the band refers to.

Pre-2008 records carry NAF rév. 1 codes. Establishments closed before the 2008 reclassification still show codes like 55.3A or 74.1J, which have no rév. 2 label. Those rows get the code with nafLabel empty rather than a wrong label.

The host drops connections. From some networks roughly half of new connections to this API are reset before any response, in bursts of eight or more in a row. The Actor retries each request up to twelve times on transport errors as well as on HTTP 429 and 503. A ten-search test run covering 326 companies completed in 23 seconds through a connection that was failing at that rate.

Who uses this

Sales and prospecting teams building French target lists by activity, size band and territory. Marketplaces and platforms verifying that a seller's SIREN exists and is still active before onboarding. Credit, procurement and compliance teams checking legal form, filed turnover and company officers. Recruiters and researchers sizing a sector by NAF code. Local authorities and trade bodies mapping who is actually operating in a commune.

Source and licence

recherche-entreprises.api.gouv.fr, published by the DINUM as part of the Annuaire des Entreprises. It aggregates INSEE's Sirene register (companies, establishments, addresses, activity codes, employee bands), the RNE business register held by INPI (company officers), the filed annual accounts, and a set of public certification registers. Free, keyless, French public-sector open data under the Licence Ouverte 2.0. Queried live on every run; nothing is cached or stored by this Actor.

Every row carries an annuaireUrl to the official public page for that company or establishment on annuaire-entreprises.data.gouv.fr.

Frequently asked

Why does my search say 10 000 matches when there are clearly more? The register saturates its own counter at 10 000 and will not page beyond it. totalResultsCapped marks that row. Split the search by department, postcode or NAF code.

Why is a company outside my department in the results? department and postcode filter on establishments. The company has a site in your area even though its registered office is elsewhere. Turn on includeEstablishments to see which one.

Why does a SIREN I asked for come back as ceased when activeOnly is on? Direct lookups by SIREN or SIRET are exact and the filters are not applied to them. Returning nothing would look like the number was wrong rather than the company closed.

Why is revenue empty? Because that company has not filed accounts, or filed them without a turnover figure. Roughly half the register has no published turnover at all. financialYear is empty on exactly the same rows.

Why are the NAF labels in French when the rest is in English? nafLabel is the registered wording of the activity in the French classification. Translating 732 sub-class names would invent labels the register does not use, and they would no longer match what the official directory shows. The 21-section level, which maps onto the European NACE classification, is given in English as nafSectionLabel.

Can I search for a person? No. The upstream API offers it; this Actor does not expose it, by design.

Does a search cost anything when it returns nothing? A search is charged once as search-run whether or not it matches. Companies are charged separately as company-returned, so a search that legitimately returns zero costs only the search.