France Company Search (SIRENE): Companies by NAF Code, Department & Region

What does France Company Search do?

It searches the French company register (INSEE Sirene) through the official French government API, API Recherche d'entreprises (data.gouv.fr). You can filter by NAF/APE code, activity section, department, region, postal code, company size (PME/ETI/GE), legal form and creation date. You get SIREN, name, creation date, status, headcount band, head-office city and the latest revenue as clean JSON, CSV or Excel. You don't need an API key.

Why use it?

• Official, keyless and openly licensed: the data comes from a French government API under the Licence Ouverte 2.0, which allows commercial reuse with attribution. There's no scraping and no account to create.
• No personal data by design: sole proprietors (entrepreneurs individuels, whose company name is a person's name) and "non-diffusible" records are dropped. Directors (dirigeants) are never requested, and the head office is given at city, postal-code, department and region level only.
• B2B-ready fields: NAF code, size category, employee band, number of establishments, latest revenue and net income (when published), plus a link to the official Annuaire des Entreprises page.
• Monitoring mode: schedule the Actor and turn on Only new items to receive only companies you haven't seen before.
• Fair pay-per-result pricing with a hard stop at your maximum cost per run.

How to use

1. Choose filters, for example Activity section J (information & communication) and Department 75 (Paris).
2. Optionally add NAF codes (for example 62.01Z), a creation date range, size category or legal form codes (for example 5710 SAS).
3. Set Max results (default 25) and click Start.
4. For monitoring, create a daily or weekly Schedule and turn on Only new items.

Input example

{
  "nafCodes": ["62.01Z"],
  "departments": ["69"],
  "status": "active",
  "companyCategories": ["PME"],
  "createdFrom": "2025-01-01",
  "maxItems": 200,
  "maxPagesToScan": 40
}

Output example

{
  "siren": "123456789",
  "name": "EXEMPLE LOGICIEL",
  "acronym": "EXL",
  "creation_date": "2024-03-01",
  "status": "active",
  "naf_code": "62.01Z",
  "naf_section": "J",
  "legal_form_code": "5710",
  "company_category": "PME",
  "employee_band": "11",
  "is_employer": true,
  "establishments": 2,
  "open_establishments": 1,
  "hq_siret": "12345678900011",
  "hq_postal_code": "75002",
  "hq_city": "PARIS",
  "hq_department": "75",
  "hq_region": "11",
  "financial_year": "2023",
  "revenue_eur": 2000000,
  "net_income_eur": 150000,
  "url": "https://annuaire-entreprises.data.gouv.fr/entreprise/123456789",
  "source": "API Recherche d'entreprises (DINUM / INSEE Sirene, data.gouv.fr)",
  "license": "Licence Ouverte / Open Licence 2.0 (Etalab)",
  "fetched_at": "2026-09-21T05:00:00Z"
}

employee_band and legal_form_code are INSEE codes (tranche d'effectif salarié and catégorie juridique).

Pricing

This Actor is pay per event:

• $1.50 per 1,000 companies (result event, $0.0015 each)
• plus Apify's small automatic start event (apify-actor-start)

The default run (25 companies) costs about $0.04. Set Max cost per run in the run options, and the Actor stops cleanly when the limit is reached.

Why France, and why this API?

We compared the official, free company-register APIs of EU countries before choosing one:

Country / API	Key needed	Commercial reuse	Notes
France, API Recherche d'entreprises	No	Yes (Licence Ouverte 2.0)	Government-run, stable, rich filters (NAF, department, size). Chosen.
Germany, Handelsregister	No official search API	Restricted	Existing Store tools scrape the portal.
Netherlands, KVK API	Yes (paid per call)	Per contract	Cost per query.
Denmark, CVR	Credentials on request	Yes	Access has to be requested manually.

Data source and license

• Source: API Recherche d'entreprises by DINUM, based on INSEE Sirene and other public registers (data.gouv.fr).
• License: Licence Ouverte / Open Licence 2.0. Attribution: "Source: API Recherche d'entreprises / INSEE Sirene, data.gouv.fr", with the date of retrieval (fetched_at).
• The API limits clients to 7 requests per second. This Actor stays below that and retries politely on HTTP 429.

Limitations

• The API has no creation-date filter. createdFrom and createdTo are applied to the pages scanned, up to maxPagesToScan × 25 companies, so narrow date searches may need a higher maxPagesToScan.
• A search returns at most 10,000 companies (400 pages).
• Sole proprietors are always excluded, so counts are lower than the raw register.
• Financial data is only available for companies that publish accounts.

Your responsibility

You are responsible for using the data in line with the source's terms and applicable law, including the GDPR and French rules on direct marketing (CNIL). This Actor calls only the official public API and doesn't output personal data. Don't combine it with other sources to profile individuals.

AI disclosure

This Actor's planning, code and description were created with generative AI (Claude) and are verified by automated tests. Supported environment: the Apify platform (Python 3.11).

Changelog

• 0.1 (2026-09): first release.