Company lookup
Check a Legal Entity Identifier or a UK company number against open business registers copied onto this server: the legal name, whether the company is still live in the register's own words, the jurisdiction it belongs to, the date it was incorporated, and whether the LEI's check digits add up. Free, no signup — every answer names the register copy it came from and the day that copy was published.
Live demo
POST /demo/entity · no key needed
Response
Look up an identifier to see the full API response, straight from the live service. There is no registered address in it, deliberately.
What gets checked
Five answers, from one query against a table on this server. The legal name as the register writes it. The status — active, inactive or dissolved — together with status_detail, which is the register's own wording rather than ours, so “Active - Proposal to Strike off” reaches you as the register wrote it instead of being flattened into a yes. The jurisdiction the entity belongs to, and the country. The date it was incorporated or first registered. And, for a LEI, whether its two check digits satisfy the ISO 7064 MOD 97-10 arithmetic.
Where a LEI names its entry in a national register this server also holds, the two records are compared field by field and both sides are quoted, so a disagreement can be read rather than taken on trust. Nothing in the request leaves this machine: there is no third party in the path, because the registers were bulk-copied here in advance.
“Not carried here” is not “does not exist”
This is the line the lookup will not cross. Only the registers copied onto this server can answer, so a negative means those registers could not answer — never that the company is not real. An identifier from a register this service does not hold answers “not carried here”, and reason says which of the four cases it was.
| reason | what it means |
|---|---|
| unknown_identifier | The register held here was read and does not carry that identifier. It may belong to a register this server does not hold, or it may have left the one it was in — a struck-off UK company is removed from the file rather than marked dissolved. |
| malformed_identifier | It is not shaped like the type asked for, so no register was read. A LEI is twenty characters of letters and digits; a UK company number is at most eight, and is padded with leading zeros first, so 445790 and 00445790 are the same company. |
| unsupported_register | No register is held here for that country. The identifier may be perfectly good in a register this service has never copied. |
| register_unavailable | The register is part of the product but no copy has landed on this server yet, so there was nothing to read. That answer is never cached: the next lookup answers properly as soon as the file arrives. |
No registered address, deliberately
There is no street address in the answer, and there will not be. A registered address is very often somebody's home — that is why protected-address regimes exist — and an identifier on its own does not say whether a limited company or a sole trader stands behind it. A sole trader's registered details are personal data in a way a company's are not, so this product stores no address at all rather than sorting the two out after the fact.
What is left still answers the question people actually come with: whether the name on the invoice is a real, live entity, where it was formed, and since when. The lookup is about organisations, not the people behind them, and it holds nothing that could be turned into a directory of where anybody lives.
Reading the answer
status is about the entity; registration_status is about the identifier. A LEI has to be reconfirmed each year and a great many are not, so a lapsed registration means the reference data has not been rechecked recently — not that the company has gone. checksum_valid is arithmetic on the characters and nothing more: a perfectly formed LEI can never have been issued, and a record can exist whose check digits fail, which is why both are printed side by side.
An answer can also be behind the register. The UK company file is republished monthly, within five working days of the previous month end, so a company that changed yesterday can still read here as it was last month. That is why every answer names its register copy and the day that copy was published, instead of implying a live query. The business verification guide has every field, the flags and the cross-register comparison in full.
What this server holds today
Read live from the sync bookkeeping, so it is what the lookup above actually ran against rather than a marketing claim. An identifier outside these registers cannot be answered here, and is told so in those words.
| register | covers | copy published | records |
|---|---|---|---|
| Legal Entity Identifiers gleif-lei-level-1 | worldwide | 2026-09-08 | 3,424,918 |
| UK companies uk-companies-house-entities | United Kingdom | 2026-09-01 | 5,689,367 |
- GLEIF Legal Entity Identifier reference data (CC0 1.0)
- Companies House free company data product, Open Government Licence v3.0
This is not official LEI data. The Legal Entity Identifier reference data is published by the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation under a CC0 1.0 public-domain dedication and Spaw answers from its own copy of it; Spaw is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to that foundation in any way, and an answer here is Spaw's, not theirs. UK company data is the Companies House free company data product, used under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Frequently asked questions
Does a “not carried here” answer mean the company is fake?
No, and the wording is deliberate. This lookup can only read the registers copied onto this server, so a negative says that none of them answered — never that the company does not exist. An identifier from a register this service does not hold answers “not carried here”, and the reason field says which of the four cases it was: the identifier is malformed, the register held here does not carry it, no register is held for that country, or the register has not been synced yet.
Which identifiers can I look up?
A Legal Entity Identifier, which is global by construction and needs no country, and a UK company number, which belongs to the UK register — company numbers are only unique inside their own register, so one country’s number means nothing in another’s. The table on this page lists exactly which registers this server holds today and the date of each copy.
Is this official LEI data?
No. It is Spaw’s own copy of the freely published Legal Entity Identifier reference data, which is released under a CC0 1.0 public-domain dedication, and the answer you get here is Spaw’s answer rather than the issuing foundation’s. Spaw is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation in any way. If you need an authoritative record, read it from the foundation itself.
Why is there no registered address in the answer?
Because a registered address is very often somebody’s home, and an identifier on its own does not say whether a limited company or a sole trader stands behind it — a sole trader’s registered details are personal data in a way a company’s are not. So no street address is stored or returned here, deliberately. The lookup answers country and jurisdiction, which settle whether this is a real, live entity without keeping a register of where people live.
Does a valid check digit mean the LEI was issued?
No. checksum_valid reports the ISO 7064 MOD 97-10 check digit, the same arithmetic an IBAN uses: it catches a mistyped or transposed character and nothing else. A perfectly formed LEI can never have been issued, which is what the register lookup answers — so the two facts are reported side by side rather than one standing in for the other.
How fresh is the answer?
It is as fresh as the copy on this server, and the response says which day that copy was published. The Legal Entity Identifier reference data is published daily and copied here weekly; the UK company file is republished monthly, within five working days of the previous month end, so an answer from it can be up to five weeks behind the live register. Nothing here is a live query against a register, and this page never claims otherwise.
Is there a limit on this free lookup?
Ten lookups a minute per visitor. For volume there is a batch endpoint and scheduled monitoring of saved identifier lists behind a free API key, with 10 lookups a month included and no card required. An identifier no register can answer costs nothing there either.
More free tools
All free toolsNeed this at scale?
The Spaw API runs the same lookup with a batch endpoint, scheduled monitoring of saved identifier lists and webhooks when a company is dissolved or a LEI lapses — 10 free lookups a month, no card required.