Which EU countries let you check a company for free: a status table

If you are building anything that touches European business data — onboarding, invoicing, KYB, fraud checks — you will eventually ask the same question I did: which countries can I actually get company data from, for free, without an account? I could not find this written down anywhere, so I worked it out the hard way while building a supplier checker. Here it is. The baseline: VIES The European Commission runs VIES , which validates VAT numbers across all 27 member states plus Northern Ireland ( XI ). It is free, it needs no key, and it is the obvious starting point. Two things about it are worth knowing before you build on it. It answers one question: is this VAT number currently registered. It does not tell you the company is solvent, trading, or that it has not been struck off. A company in liquidation keeps a cleanly resolving VAT number for months, because deregistration and insolvency are run by different authorities on different timetables. Name and address are returned for 25 of the 28 jurisdictions, not all of them. Germany and Spain confirm registration but publish no company name through VIES. I tested three valid numbers for each before accepting that. For those two, a yes/no is genuinely all you can honestly show. Where you can go further, free Ten countries publish enough through a national register to add something meaningful on top of VIES: Country Free register Reports company state Reports VAT-active Romania yes yes yes Poland yes — yes Slovenia yes — yes Estonia yes yes — France yes yes — Greece yes yes — Bulgaria yes yes — Latvia yes yes — Czechia yes — — Finland yes — — Company state means the register tells you whether a business is inactive, in liquidation, bankrupt, insolvent, terminated or struck off. This is the valuable column, and only six countries have it. VAT-active matters more than it sounds. VIES cannot distinguish "this is a real company that is not VAT-registered" from "this number belongs to nobody". Three registers can. Note th