GLEIF LEI Search — Legal Entity Identifiers, Owners and Subsidiaries

Search the global register of Legal Entity Identifiers — roughly 2.7 million legal entities, the identifier that MiFID II, EMIR and most KYC files are built on — by company name, country, national company number or LEI, and get back the entity behind the code together with its declared parent and its subsidiaries.

Official GLEIF data, queried live. No key, no scraping, no licence per lookup.

What a record returns

MINO79WLOO247M1IL051:

Field	Value
lei, legalName	MINO79WLOO247M1IL051 · AIRBUS SE
legalAddressLines, legalAddressCity, legalAddressPostalCode	MENDELWEG 30 · LEIDEN · 2333CS
country, jurisdiction	NL · NL
otherNames	AIRBUS GROUP SE
entityCategory, legalFormCode	GENERAL · BBEB
entityStatus, registrationStatus	ACTIVE · ISSUED
registeredAs, registrationAuthority	24288945 · RA000463
initialRegistrationDate, lastUpdateDate, nextRenewalDate	2012-06-06 · 2025-10-23 · 2026-12-12
managingLou, corroborationLevel	213800WAVVOPS85N2205 · FULLY_CORROBORATED
bic, ocid	AIRBNL22XXX · nl/24288945
hasDirectParent, hasChildren	false · true
gleifUrl	https://search.gleif.org/#/record/MINO79WLOO247M1IL051

Headquarters address comes back as a separate set of fields, because for holding companies and funds it is routinely a different place from the legal address.

How name matching actually works

This is the part that surprises people, so it is worth being exact. filter[entity.legalName] matches whole words, case-insensitively, in any order, all of them required. It is not a prefix search and not fuzzy.

You search	Entities returned
Airbus	99
AIRBUS SE	1
airbus se	1
Airbus Operations	4
Operations Airbus	4 — word order is irrelevant
airbu	0 — partial words never match
Airbus Operations GmbH	0 — no single entity carries all three words

So adding a word narrows, removing a word widens, and a truncated word finds nothing. If a search comes back empty, the most likely cause is a word that is not in the registered legal name — GmbH where the register says AG, or a trading name where the register holds the legal one.

Filters combine

Filters are ANDed by the API, not merged or dropped:

Query	Matches
Deutsche Bank	382
Deutsche Bank + country DE	11
Deutsche Bank + country DE + status ISSUED	10

Airbus alone returns 99; Airbus with entity status ACTIVE returns 87 and with INACTIVE returns 12 — the two halves add up, which is the check that the filter is genuinely being applied.

City is the exception. The GLEIF API has no city filter — sending one is refused outright — so this Actor applies the city to the rows it has already fetched. It narrows what you get; it does not reach further into the register. Pair it with a country and a specific name, and raise the result cap.

Parents and subsidiaries

Turn on Include parent companies and every entity gets a row for its direct parent and a row for its ultimate parent. Turn on Include subsidiaries and every entity that names it as direct parent comes back as a row. AIRBUS SE returns 31 direct subsidiaries across thirteen countries — 11 in France, 7 in Germany, 3 in the UK, the rest in Canada, Spain, Ireland, Luxembourg, Hungary, Denmark, Finland, Japan, Korea and Singapore. Rows are linked by parentOfLei and childOfLei.

"No parent" is an answer, not an error

GLEIF does not leave the parent field blank. An entity that has no parent has to say so, with a category and a reason, and the Actor returns that statement as a row with relationType NO_PARENT_DECLARED:

Entity	Reason	What it means
AIRBUS SE	NO_KNOWN_PERSON	Nobody consolidates it — it is the top of the tree
AIRBUS DEFENCE AND SPACE GMBH	NON_CONSOLIDATING	It has an owner, but no one files consolidated accounts that include it

Other reasons you will meet are NATURAL_PERSONS (owned by individuals, who have no LEI) and NO_LEI (the parent exists but never obtained an identifier). For due diligence the distinction matters: NO_KNOWN_PERSON on a counterparty means you have reached the ultimate owner, NATURAL_PERSONS means the beneficial owner is a person and the register will not name them.

This also means the tree is much thinner than reality. Of sixty consecutive UK entities sampled from the register, exactly one had a parent LEI on file; the other fifty-nine had filed an exception — 26 NATURAL_PERSONS, 21 NON_CONSOLIDATING, 11 NO_KNOWN_PERSON, 1 NO_LEI. AIRBUS DEFENCE AND SPACE GMBH is wholly owned by Airbus and does not appear as its child, because it filed NON_CONSOLIDATING. GLEIF records who reports what, not who owns what. Treat an absent link as unreported, never as independence.

Who uses this

Compliance and KYC teams resolving a counterparty name to a verifiable identifier before onboarding. Banks and brokers filling the LEI field on MiFID II, EMIR and SFTR reports. Data teams matching an internal customer table to a national company number through registeredAs. Corporate-intelligence and sanctions-screening products that need the ownership layer under a name. Anyone checking whether a counterparty's identifier is still ISSUED rather than quietly LAPSED.

Scope and limits

The register only holds entities that applied for an identifier. Roughly 2.7 million worldwide, heavily weighted towards the financial sector and towards jurisdictions where an LEI is mandatory for trading. A small private company with no market activity will usually not be in it at all.

LAPSED is common and is not an error. An LEI must be revalidated every twelve months; a large share of the register is past due. The record stays visible and still identifies the entity, but the underlying data has not been reconfirmed. Only ISSUED means recently checked. Filter on registration status if that matters to you.

Entity status and registration status are independent. AIRBUS SECURE LAND COMMUNICATIONS GMBH is an ACTIVE company holding a LAPSED identifier. An INACTIVE company can hold an ISSUED one. Neither implies the other.

Addresses are registered addresses. For funds and holding companies that is frequently a fund administrator's office, not an operating site.

Source and licence

GLEIF — the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation — through api.gleif.org/api/v1. GLEIF publishes the register under CC0, free for any use including commercial, with no attribution requirement. The data comes from the LEI issuers (LOUs) that validate each record against the national business register named in registrationAuthority. Queried live on every run; the response carries the golden-copy publication date of that day.

Frequently asked

Why did my search return nothing when the company clearly exists? Two likely reasons. Either the company has no LEI — most do not — or a word in your search is not in its registered legal name. Try the distinctive word alone: Airbus rather than Airbus Operations GmbH.

How do I get exactly one entity instead of ninety-nine? Use the LEI if you have it, or the national company number, which is exact. 775724792 returns AIRBUS GROUP and nothing else. Failing that, type the full registered name including the legal form — AIRBUS SE returns one row.

What is registeredAs? The company's number in its home business register: SIREN in France, HRB 171306 in Germany, the Companies House number in the UK. registrationAuthority says which register that is, as a GLEIF RA code. It is the most reliable join key between an LEI and a record you already hold.

Does the name search look at trading names and former names? No. It searches the registered legal name only. The otherNames field on the returned row carries the alternatives the entity declared — AIRBUS SE also files as AIRBUS GROUP SE — but you cannot search on them, so a former name may find nothing even though it is on the record.

How many results can one search return? The register is paged 200 at a time and the Actor pages through it, so the cap is whatever you set, up to 10 000 per name. A search for Bank matches tens of thousands, which is what the cap is there to stop.

Is an invalid or unknown LEI charged? No. Malformed codes are rejected before any request is made, and codes that are well formed but absent from the register are reported in the search summary. You are billed per entity returned.

Are parent and subsidiary rows charged separately? No. They are included with the entity they hang off. A search that returns one entity and its 31 subsidiaries is charged as one entity.