Canada Corporations API: Federal Company Register

Look up any Canadian federal corporation by company name, corporation number or CRA business number and get clean, structured records straight from the official Corporations Canada register: legal name (English and French forms), status, incorporation date, governing act, business number and registered office address.

No API key, no sign-up, no scraping. The data is the government's own open dataset, published under the Open Government Licence – Canada, refreshed daily by Corporations Canada.

What it does

• Search by name across about 1.58 million federal corporations: every word you type must start a word of the corporate name, in either language form, accents ignored (societe quebecoise finds Société Québécoise…).
• Look up by number: a Corporations Canada corporation number (4252292 or 425229-2) or a 9-digit business number (BN9, or the full 15-character BN like 121610299RC0001).
• Filter by status (active, inactive/dissolved, or all) and by type (business corporations under the CBCA, or not-for-profits, co-operatives, boards of trade and special act corporations).
• Best matches first: exact name matches, then names starting with your words, active before inactive.
• Company-level data only. Directors are never fetched or returned.

Who it's for

• KYB, onboarding and compliance teams verifying that a Canadian company exists, is active, and matches the business number a customer gave.
• Sales and lead-gen teams enriching CRM accounts with corporation numbers, incorporation dates and head-office cities.
• Developers and AI agents that need a simple, keyless Canada company lookup tool.
• Researchers studying federal incorporations, dissolutions and not-for-profits.

Input

Field	What it does	Default
queries	Company names, corporation numbers or business numbers, one per line	Bombardier Inc., Canadian National Railway, 4252292
statusFilter	active, inactive or all (name searches; number lookups always search every status)	active
corporationTypes	business (CBCA) and/or other (not-for-profit, co-op, board of trade, special act)	both
maxResultsPerQuery	Best matches returned per query	10
maxItems	Hard cap on records for the whole run	100

{
  "queries": ["Bombardier Inc.", "Canadian National Railway", "4252292", "121610299RC0001"],
  "statusFilter": "active",
  "corporationTypes": ["business", "other"],
  "maxResultsPerQuery": 5,
  "maxItems": 50
}

Output

One record per matching corporation:

{
  "query": "4252292",
  "rank": 1,
  "corporationNumber": "4252292",
  "businessNumber": "121610299",
  "name": "BCE INC.",
  "alternateName": "BCE INC.",
  "status": "Active",
  "statusDetail": null,
  "isActive": true,
  "governingAct": "Canada Business Corporations Act",
  "corporationType": "business corporation",
  "incorporationDate": "2004-08-01",
  "lastAnnualFilingYear": 2026,
  "lastAnnualMeetingDate": "2026-05-07",
  "registeredOfficeAddress": "1 Carrefour Alexander-Graham-Bell, A-8, Verdun, QC, H3E 3B3, CA",
  "addressLine1": "1 Carrefour Alexander-Graham-Bell",
  "addressLine2": "A-8",
  "city": "Verdun",
  "province": "QC",
  "postalCode": "H3E 3B3",
  "country": "CA",
  "sourceUrl": "https://ised-isde.canada.ca/cc/lgcy/fdrlCrpDtls.html?corpId=4252292&lang=eng",
  "datasetFile": "https://d4bf66bykfyaf.cloudfront.net/corporations-active-cbca-en.csv",
  "dataAsOf": "2026-11-03",
  "source": "Corporations Canada (Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada), Federal Corporations open data",
  "licence": "Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence - Canada (https://open.canada.ca/en/open-government-licence-canada).",
  "retrievedAt": "2026-11-03T20:45:00Z",
  "matchType": "corporationNumber"
}

Field notes:

• incorporationDate is Corporations Canada's anniversary date: the date the corporation was incorporated, amalgamated or continued under its current act.
• statusDetail gives the register's wording, e.g. Active - Dissolution Pending (non-compliance), Dissolved for non-compliance, Inactive - Amalgamated.
• alternateName is the second legal form of the name (often the French or English version).
• registeredOfficeAddress is the registered office address the register publishes for the corporation.
• sourceUrl opens the corporation's page on the official Corporations Canada search.

Pricing

Pay per event, no subscription:

• $0.005 per run (start)
• $0.0015 per corporation record returned

Looking up 100 companies costs about $0.16. You only pay for records you get. Set maxItems (or a maximum cost per run) to cap spend.

How fast is it?

Each run downloads the official daily files it needs (about 113 MB for active corporations, 280 MB for all) and scans them once for every query in your list, so 1 query or 500 queries take about the same time: typically 20–40 seconds for active corporations, up to about a minute when searching all statuses. Batch your queries into one run.

Data source and licence

• Source: Federal Corporations dataset, Corporations Canada, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, on the Government of Canada Open Government Portal: https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/0032ce54-c5dd-4b66-99a0-320a7b5e99f2 (updated daily).
• Licence: Open Government Licence – Canada, which allows copying, adapting and redistributing the information, including for commercial purposes, with attribution. Every record carries the attribution in its licence field.
• This Actor is independent and is not endorsed by the Government of Canada or Corporations Canada.

Limits

• Covers federal corporations only (about 1.58 million incorporated under the CBCA, NFP Act, Canada Cooperatives Act, Boards of Trade Act, Canada Corporations Act and special acts). Companies incorporated only under a provincial or territorial act (e.g. Ontario or BC companies) and federally regulated banks, insurers and trust companies are not in this dataset.
• Data is as fresh as the daily government file (dataAsOf shows the file date).
• No directors, officers or shareholders are returned, by design.
• Very short or common words (e.g. canada, holdings) match hundreds of thousands of names; add more words for useful results.

Use with AI agents (MCP)

This Actor works as a tool for AI agents through the Apify MCP server: add canada-federal-corporations to your MCP client (Claude, Cursor, VS Code and others) and ask things like "Is BCE Inc. still an active federal corporation, and what is its business number?". The input is a simple list of names or numbers and the output is flat JSON, so agents can call it without setup. You can also call it from the Apify API, Python or JavaScript clients, Make, Zapier or n8n.

FAQ

Do I need a Corporations Canada API key? No. The Actor uses the government's open bulk dataset, which needs no key.

Can I get a company's directors? No. This Actor returns company-level information only.

Why didn't my company show up? It may be provincially incorporated, a financial institution, inactive (set statusFilter to all), or your query has a word that isn't in the legal name. Try fewer words or the corporation number.