Saimaa ringed seal, Rantasalmi, Finland. Photo: Jan Ebr and Ivana Ebrová, CC BY 4.0
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Business data in France. Where the records live.
Since 2023 every French business has been recorded in the INPI-run Registre National des Entreprises, on top of INSEE's open SIRENE base, together covering well over 4 million legal units, most of them micro-entrepreneurs.
What Atlas holds for France
Source: the Atlas database, updated automatically.
The official records
The legal source of truth for France is SIRENE / Infogreffe.
France overhauled its company records in January 2023, folding the old patchwork of commercial (RCS), trades and agricultural registers into a single Registre National des Entreprises (RNE) maintained by the INPI. Alongside it sits INSEE's SIRENE repository, the statistical backbone that issues the 9-digit SIREN identifying each legal unit and the 14-digit SIRET for each establishment; both are published as free, daily-updated open data. The active base now exceeds 14 million SIREN units, but that figure is inflated by the auto-entrepreneur regime, roughly 700,000 new micro-entrepreneurs register in a single year, so the count of substantive trading firms is far smaller.
How to use the register
- Start from the register, not from a bought list. It is the legal record of every company.
- Read the status field. Registers keep closed companies too. See how many have closed in other registers.
- Check the website belongs to the company, with the registration number or a distinguishing name on the page.
Sources
Descriptions are based on the national sources above. Figures in the text are rounded and change over time. Found an error? Write to atlasforgex@proton.me. More countries: business data by country and registers by country.