Company data coverage by country: a 174-jurisdiction comparison of Global Database and OpenCorporates

Why this analysis

Anyone who works with company data knows the frustration of opening a registry record and not being sure how current it really is. The official jurisdiction is one thing; the date that record was last refreshed is another. For compliance, KYB onboarding, supplier verification, and customer due diligence, the gap between those two facts matters more than almost anything else in the dataset.

To give the industry a clearer picture of where the data freshness situation stands today, we ran a structured comparison between Global Database and OpenCorporates across 174 territories. The goal was simple: take the publicly available freshness information published by each provider, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, and present it in one place so anyone evaluating a corporate-data supplier can make an informed decision.

This article presents the full findings, the methodology, and the underlying data tables. Every claim links back to a publicly verifiable source.

What we measured

The comparison focused on three indicators per jurisdiction:

• Coverage — does each provider hold company records for the jurisdiction, and how many?
• Connectivity status — does the provider's feed to that jurisdiction's registry currently receive updates?
• Refresh frequency — how often does each provider update its records for that jurisdiction?

The OpenCorporates indicators come from knowledge.opencorporates.com, where every jurisdiction has its own page documenting "New incorporations expected," "Company updates expected," and a "Data last updated" field. We verified 146 of 147 OpenCorporates jurisdiction pages directly. The remaining one (Saint Pierre and Miquelon) was sourced from OpenCorporates' Coverage HeatMap dated 18 August 2025 because the per-jurisdiction page is not currently indexed.

The Global Database refresh frequencies come from globaldatabase.com/data-sources, which publishes the source registry, tax authority, and refresh frequency for every territory Global Database covers.

The audit was completed on 30 April 2026.

Headline findings

Across the 174 territories audited, Global Database holds 684,909,476 company records against OpenCorporates' 234,330,986, a coverage ratio of approximately 2.92x.

The most material finding from a freshness perspective is that 61 of OpenCorporates' 147 jurisdictions are currently listed as offline on both feeds — neither new-incorporations nor company-updates are receiving regular refreshes. Those 61 jurisdictions account for 55,570,934 companies, or roughly 23.7% of OpenCorporates' total published universe.

For 16 of those 61 jurisdictions, the most recent registry refresh recorded on OpenCorporates' own knowledge base is more than 10 years old. For 43 of them, it's more than 5 years old.

How the freshness picture distributes

Here is the full distribution of the 147 OpenCorporates jurisdictions we audited, by their published "Data last updated" timestamp as of 30 April 2026:

• 16 jurisdictions have not been refreshed in more than 10 years
• 27 jurisdictions have not been refreshed in 5 to 10 years
• 18 jurisdictions have not been refreshed in 2 to 5 years
• 86 jurisdictions have been refreshed within the last 2 years (most within April 2026)

The 86 actively refreshed jurisdictions include the major US states, all eight Canadian provinces audited, and most large Western European economies — France, the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark, Latvia, Slovakia, and Cyprus among them. The freshness gradient on the OpenCorporates side is not uniform; large parts of the platform are kept current. The point of the audit is to surface where it isn't.

The 61 OpenCorporates jurisdictions where the registry feed is currently offline

Every row in the table below represents a jurisdiction where OpenCorporates' own knowledge base lists both the new-incorporations feed and the company-updates feed as offline as of the audit date. The "OC Status" column is included on every row to make the underlying state explicit.

Each row also shows OpenCorporates' published "Data last updated" field, the resulting years stale (calculated against 30 April 2026), and — where Global Database covers the same jurisdiction — the published Global Database refresh frequency for comparison.

Table 1. The 61 OpenCorporates jurisdictions on offline feeds, sorted by company count. Source: knowledge.opencorporates.com (verified per page). Audit date: 30 April 2026.

Jurisdictions where the freshness gap is widest

Of the 61 offline OpenCorporates jurisdictions, 27 are also covered by Global Database with active refresh feeds. The table below shows those 27 territories, sorted by years stale on the OpenCorporates side. For each, the right-hand column shows Global Database's published refresh frequency for the same jurisdiction, sourced from globaldatabase.com/data-sources.

Table 2. The 27 jurisdictions where OpenCorporates feeds are offline and Global Database publishes an active refresh schedule. Sorted by years stale on the OpenCorporates side.

Where Global Database extends beyond OpenCorporates

Twenty-four territories are covered by Global Database but not by OpenCorporates.

Table 3. Territories covered by Global Database that are not on OpenCorporates' published list of jurisdictions.

Where OpenCorporates extends beyond Global Database

The picture is not one-directional. Fifty-one territories are covered by OpenCorporates but not currently by Global Database. The majority are smaller offshore or special-jurisdiction registries. The full list is below, sorted by OpenCorporates company count. The right-hand column flags whether the OpenCorporates feed for the jurisdiction is itself live or also offline — a relevant signal for anyone considering OpenCorporates as a primary source for any of these territories.

Table 4. Jurisdictions on OpenCorporates that are not currently covered by Global Database.

Both providers cover, both feeds active

For 69 territories, both providers publish active refreshes. This is the cleanest comparison set. Volume comparisons here reflect actual differences in registry ingestion or scope, rather than feed connectivity. The "Advantage %" column shows how Global Database's count compares to OpenCorporates' on the same jurisdiction.

Table 5. The 69 territories where both providers publish active refreshes. Volume figures sourced from each provider's coverage documentation.

The two columns that matter most for compliance work

One detail in the OpenCorporates methodology deserves a closer look. Every OpenCorporates jurisdiction page reports two separate freshness indicators, not one:

• New incorporations expected — how often newly registered companies are added
• Company updates expected — how often changes to existing companies are reflected (officer changes, address changes, status changes, dissolutions, filings)

The two can differ substantially within the same jurisdiction. A registry can be marked "daily" for new incorporations and "annually" or "infrequent" for updates. From a sales-prospecting perspective, the first column is the one that matters. From a compliance, KYB, or sanctions-screening perspective, the second column is the operative one — because that is what tells you whether a director change, a status change, or a dissolution will be reflected in the data within a useful timeframe.

Several jurisdictions in our audit show notable gaps between the two. Examples include:

• Ireland — new incorporations daily; company updates semi-annually
• Slovenia — new incorporations daily; company updates infrequent
• Ontario — new incorporations daily; company updates annually
• New Mexico — new incorporations daily; company updates annually
• Delaware — new incorporations monthly; company updates infrequent
• Alabama, Louisiana, New Jersey — company updates semi-annually
• Florida, Maryland, Montana, Washington, District of Columbia — company updates quarterly

Delaware is particularly relevant for any due-diligence flow that involves US holding-company structures. Roughly 5.7 million companies are registered in Delaware. The OpenCorporates indicator for Delaware company updates is "infrequent," which is the slowest tier in OpenCorporates' published taxonomy.

Global Database's published refresh schedule

For comparison, here is the distribution of refresh frequencies Global Database publishes for its covered territories:

• Real-time — 2 territories (United Kingdom via Companies House API, Germany via Handelsregister)
• Daily — 104 territories, including all US states, all Canadian provinces, and most major economies
• Weekly — 7 territories
• Monthly — 5 territories

The full per-jurisdiction list is published openly at globaldatabase.com/data-sources, including the named source registry and tax authority for each territory.

What this means for buyers

The practical takeaway from the audit is not "switch providers" — that's a procurement decision with many factors, and freshness is only one of them. The takeaway is: audit the freshness of the data you currently rely on, and do it against the provider's own published documentation, jurisdiction by jurisdiction. Three concrete steps:

• List the jurisdictions in your screening or onboarding flow. If you are an EU-focused KYB team, that list might include Spain, Netherlands, Poland, and Romania. If you are a financial-services compliance team with cross-border exposure, the list might include Hong Kong, Singapore, Cayman Islands, BVI, Bahamas, and Panama.
• Pull the freshness indicators for each jurisdiction from your data provider's own knowledge base or coverage documentation. Most major providers publish this. If yours doesn't, that's its own data point.
• Compare against the freshness expectations in your regulatory or operational SLAs. If your KYB policy assumes monthly updates and the underlying feed is on a quarterly or longer cadence, that's worth surfacing in your next risk-controls review.

None of this requires switching providers. It requires reading the documentation that already exists. Most procurement teams do this for the headline metrics — number of companies covered, API rate limits, pricing — and skip the per-jurisdiction freshness file. That's the gap this audit is designed to highlight.

Global Database is a B2B company intelligence platform sourcing data directly from 400+ government registries and tax authorities across 200+ jurisdictions. Every refresh frequency is published openly at globaldatabase.com/data-sources.