French SIREN and SIRET checker
Check whether a French company is active or struck off (radiée), and see its legal form, head office, workforce, directors, published financials and VAT number. Straight from official government data.
Source: recherche-entreprises.api.gouv.fr (official French government open data), refreshed daily. Informational check based on the public registry; it is not a Kbis extract and not legal proof.
Check many at once
Download the template, fill in one entry per row, and upload it to check up to 500 at a time. Your file is read in your browser; only the individual values are sent, one by one, to the official database.
Your file stays in your browser. Individual lookup values are sent through our API to the official registers; the file itself is not uploaded.
What SIREN and SIRET numbers are, and what a check tells you
SIREN and SIRET are the two French company identifiers, and they are not interchangeable. INSEE attributes the SIREN, a nine-figure number, to each legal unit; the ninth figure is a control digit, and INSEE states that the number is allocated once and is not reused, even after the legal entity disappears. The SIRET identifies an establishment: fourteen figures made of the SIREN of the legal unit it belongs to, followed by a five-figure NIC. One company therefore holds one SIREN and as many SIRETs as it has sites.
The SIREN is also the spine of a French company's other identifiers. Its intra-Community VAT number is FR, a two-character key, then those same nine SIREN digits, delivered by the business tax office. ADEME's EPR producer register stores producers against their SIRET. So one nine-digit number ties a company's tax identity to its EPR identity, and a digit transposed early in an onboarding file will propagate straight into VAT validation, EPR registration and the evidence a marketplace asks for.
Read the full explanation
A check answers the question that comes first in practice: is this company still there. The tool returns active or struck off (radiée) with the closure date, plus the creation date, legal form, NAF activity code, workforce bracket, size category, open and total establishments, head office address, directors and published financials where they have been filed. Enter a SIRET and you also learn whether that specific establishment is open or closed, which is how a live company with a shut warehouse shows up. Struck off is not an administrative detail: the VAT number attached to it stops being valid, and mandates signed in that name do not hold.
The official free search is the Annuaire des Entreprises at annuaire-entreprises.data.gouv.fr, operated by the interministerial digital directorate over INSEE, INPI and more than twenty other public sources. This page queries the same government open-data API, so the single lookup is the same lookup, and adds three things. The checksum is validated before the call, so a mistyped number is reported as a typo rather than as a company that does not exist. The French VAT number is shown with a link to verify it against VIES. And bulk mode takes 500 rows per file and returns status, name, legal form, NAF code, workforce, VAT number and cessation date for each one.
This is an informational check on public data. It is not a Kbis extract and it carries no legal force. Some owners restrict publication of their registry data (statut de diffusion protégé), and those records come back deliberately thin, which is a legitimate result rather than a fault in the search.
If the company you just looked up is your own and its French VAT filings sit with another provider, read what changing your French fiscal representative actually involves before you start the handover.
Frequently asked questions
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