Denmark Company Registry Data: How to Access CVR Company Data, Financials & UBO

Denmark runs one of the most open company registers in Europe. The Central Business Register publishes core data on every Danish business as free, structured, machine‑readable open data — and unusually, it publishes full annual accounts for private limited companies, not just listed ones. But the picture changed in September 2025, when beneficial‑ownership data moved behind a legitimate‑interest wall. This is what is actually available, where it lives, how current it is, and what it costs.

If you build compliance, risk, or data products that touch Danish entities, the practical questions are concrete: how many companies are there, how often does the data refresh, which fields are free and which are gated, what financials are public for private versus listed companies, and how do you pull it at scale. We answer each below, with the source and the date attached so you can verify rather than take it on trust.

Where Danish company data is published

The authoritative source is the Central Business Register — in Danish, Det Centrale Virksomhedsregister, almost always shortened to CVR. It has been the legal system of record for company base data since 1999 and is operated by the Danish Business Authority (Erhvervsstyrelsen), an agency under the Ministry of Industry, Business and Financial Affairs.

CVR covers every registered business in Denmark and, since 2018, Greenland. The one carve‑out: personally owned businesses with annual turnover below DKK 50,000 are not required to be in the register. Every other legal entity — companies, branches, foundations, associations, and public authorities — carries a unique CVR number that follows it across tax, banking, and contracts.

Three public front doors matter:

• datacvr.virk.dk — the official lookup portal. Free, no account needed, available in Danish, English, and West Greenlandic. Search by CVR number, name, address, or person.
• regnskaber.virk.dk — the annual‑accounts portal. Free access to filed annual reports, with digital coverage running back roughly two decades.
• data.virk.dk — system‑to‑system distribution of the register as open data, for programmatic access.

CVR numbers and production units (P‑numbers)

One detail trips up almost everyone ingesting CVR for the first time. The CVR number identifies the legal entity. Each physical location that entity operates — an office, a factory, a shop — gets its own P‑number (produktionsenhedsnummer), a separate 10‑digit identifier. One company can hold many P‑numbers: a single CVR with five branches sits above five P‑units.

P‑numbers drive Danish employment statistics and appear on payslips, but for KYB, invoicing, and supplier verification you key off the CVR number, not the P‑number. Both are searchable on datacvr.virk.dk. If you model the register without this one‑to‑many relationship, you will double‑count establishments as if they were separate companies — a common and avoidable error in counterparty datasets.

How many companies are there, active and inactive

Here is where most write‑ups get sloppy, because two different numbers get used interchangeably. The register holds units; the statistics office counts economically active enterprises. They are not the same, and the gap matters for anyone sizing a dataset.

As of mid‑to‑late 2025, the register held on the order of 900,000 + live units, of which roughly 380,000–390,000 are corporations (mainly anpartsselskaber / ApS and aktieselskaber / A/S) and around 300,000 are sole proprietorships, with the remainder being associations, foundations, branches, and public bodies. The statistically active enterprise population — firms with employees or meaningful revenue — is materially smaller than the headline register count, because the register also carries dormant, dissolving, and recently ceased units.

For practical work, treat the register as having three layers: a core of limited‑liability companies that file public accounts and ownership data, a long tail of sole proprietorships with thin public footprints, and a standing population of inactive and dissolving units that you must filter out before any analysis. The status field — aktiv, under oploosning (under dissolution), ophoort (ceased), under konkurs (in bankruptcy) — is the single most important attribute for telling a live counterparty from a husk.

Danish company types and how entities are classified

The register carries many legal forms, but for data work a handful account for almost everything. The split that matters most is limited‑liability versus everything else, because it decides whether a company files public accounts.

Two notes for anyone reasoning about the population. First, the IVS (iværksætterselskab), the DKK 1 entrepreneur company, was abolished in 2019; existing ones had to convert to ApS or dissolve, so a current Danish dataset should contain no live IVS entities (the form does still exist in Greenland). Second, the ApS minimum capital was cut from DKK 40,000 to DKK 20,000 in early 2025 — worth knowing if you reconcile capital figures against older records. Corporate tax is a flat 22%.

Industry codes: DB07 is being replaced by DB25

Every company in CVR carries an activity code — the Dansk Branchekode. The long‑standing version, DB07, is built on NACE Rev. 2. It is now being replaced by DB25, a six‑digit Danish subdivision of NACE Rev. 2.1, which came into force across the EU on 1 January 2025 under Regulation (EU) 2023/137. On that date the Danish Business Authority reclassified the main activity code of every company in the register, so active entities now carry a DB25 code: the first four digits map to the NACE class, the last two add Danish detail.

The practical catch: the reclassification is administrative — it does not change any company's legal status — but through 2026 some Statistics Denmark outputs still report on DB07, so you will encounter both code versions in circulation. If you filter Danish companies by industry, confirm which version your source uses and bridge your time series, or you will misclassify or break trend lines across the 2025 boundary.

Three‑year dynamics

The clearest read on register churn is the bankruptcy series, which Statistics Denmark publishes for active enterprises — firms with employees or turnover above DKK 1 million, which strips out the shell‑company noise.

The shape of the last three years is a post‑COVID rebound: support packages suppressed insolvencies through 2020–2021, then 2023 spiked to a 13‑year high before easing back in 2024. Construction and trade carried most of it — together roughly 45% of active‑enterprise bankruptcies in 2023. Early‑2026 monthly prints suggest the rate is running broadly in line with the longer‑run average rather than spiking, though full‑year 2025 figures were still consolidating at the time of writing, so treat any single‑year 2025 total with caution.

What data is free, and what costs money

This is Denmark's headline advantage: the core register is genuinely free and open. The cost question is less about the registry charging you and more about how much engineering you spend turning documents into usable data.

So the honest framing is: looking up one Danish company is free; operating on all of them is not. The registry will hand you a company's accounts as a document, but it will not hand you "every active construction ApS in Jutland with revenue above DKK 10m and a director change in the last 12 months." That kind of query — segmentation, screening, change monitoring — is where paid layers exist.

Two fields that trip people up: VAT and advertising protection

Beyond the headline data, two CVR fields cause more downstream problems than their size suggests. Both are free to read; both are easy to misuse.

VAT (moms) registration status

CVR records whether an entity is VAT‑registered (shown as Momsregistreret: Ja/Nej). Danish VAT is 25%, and registration is required once taxable sales pass DKK 50,000 over a 12‑month period, so a genuinely trading company is usually registered — a missing VAT flag on an ostensibly active business is worth a second look. One caveat for cross‑border trade: the CVR flag tells you the Danish position, but the authoritative check for an EU VAT number is the European Commission's VIES system. Treat the CVR VAT status and a VIES validation as two separate checks, not one.

Advertising protection (reklamebeskyttelse)

Any entity can flag itself reklamebeskyttet — advertising‑protected — to opt out of direct marketing. The flag sits at the CVR or P‑number level and shows in the public record. If a unit is protected, its CVR data must not be used by private parties for direct marketing, and if you pass the data to someone else you must carry the protection flag with it. For any sales or outreach use of Danish registry data, this is not optional metadata — it is a compliance control, and stated opt‑outs have to be honoured. Strip this field out of your pipeline and you have built a marketing list that breaks Danish law.

Shareholders and beneficial owners

Denmark keeps two distinct ownership layers, and the 2025 change hit only one of them.

Legal owners and shareholders — still public

Companies register their legal owners (legale ejere) holding stakes of 5% or more, including the size of the holding and voting power, alongside founders and management. This layer remains publicly accessible through CVR. For most due‑diligence and KYB workflows on Danish counterparties, this is the workhorse field.

Beneficial owners — now gated

Separately, since 23 May 2017, Danish companies have been legally required to register their ultimate beneficial owners (reelle ejere) — the natural person who ultimately owns or controls more than 25% of shares or voting rights, directly or indirectly, or who exercises control by other means. If no such person exists, the company registers its management instead.

The change everyone in compliance needs to know: from 1 September 2025, beneficial‑ownership data is no longer openly public. Access now requires demonstrating a legitimate interest plus authentication (via MitID and a declaration). This implements the EU's Sixth Anti‑Money Laundering Directive (Directive (EU) 2024/1640) and follows the Court of Justice's November 2022 ruling that unrestricted public UBO access was a disproportionate intrusion on privacy rights.

Denmark's implementation is comparatively generous: access is still available to obliged entities under AML rules, journalists, civil society organisations, certain third‑country obliged entities, and authorised data aggregators — but it is conditional, authenticated, and logged. The era of pulling Danish UBO data anonymously and at will is over. If your product depends on it, you now need a lawful access basis, not just a scraper.

Financials: what is public for private vs public companies

Denmark's financial transparency is the part that surprises people coming from jurisdictions where private‑company accounts are hidden. Danish private limited companies file full annual accounts that are then published in CVR. Not summaries — balance sheet, income statement, notes, and (where required) an auditor's report.

The rules sit in the Danish Financial Statements Act (Årsregnskabsloven), which transposes EU Directive 2013/34/EU and sorts companies into four reporting classes:

Who must file? All limited‑liability companies — A/S, ApS, partner companies (P/S), commercial foundations, and partnerships where all partners are themselves limited‑liability entities — must submit an annual report to Erhvervsstyrelsen, which then becomes public. Sole proprietorships generally do not: they keep books for tax, but there is no public årsrapport. So the "private vs public" distinction in Denmark is not listed‑vs‑unlisted; it is limited‑liability‑vs‑sole‑trader.

Two operational details that affect anyone ingesting this data:

• Deadlines. Most companies must file within six months of their financial year‑end; listed and state‑owned companies file faster. Miss it and management faces fees and, ultimately, compulsory dissolution (tvangsoploosning).
• Format shift. For financial years with a balance‑sheet date on or after 1 January 2025, non‑financial companies must file in inline XBRL (iXBRL) only, replacing the old PDF‑plus‑XBRL dual filing. This is good news for structured extraction — but the historical archive is still overwhelmingly PDF, which is why machine‑readable financials remain a build problem for most teams.

How to access the data

There are two ways to get Danish company data, and they are not the same product: straight from the registry, or through Global Database. The registry hands you authoritative raw data; a provider hands you that same data normalised and connected. Start with the registry's own channels.

Via the registry

The official register exposes its data three ways. All three are free and authoritative — and all three give you raw data, in Danish, that you clean and process yourself. There is no official MCP server or English‑normalised feed; that layer only exists with a provider.

• Web lookup — free on datacvr.virk.dk. Perfect for verifying a single CVR number; useless for analysing thousands.
• Open‑data API — the Danish Business Authority distributes CVR as open data via system‑to‑system access, returning structured JSON. Since September 2025 it exposes two tracks: one including beneficial‑ownership data (gated to legitimate‑interest holders) and one without.
• Bulk / CSV extracts — register extracts (udtræk) pull whole slices for loading into your own systems. This is the registry's route for screening and list‑building — though the cleaning, parsing, and entity matching are yours to do.

Where registry‑direct data stops being enough

To be straight about it, the free Danish register is excellent, and for many tasks you do not need anything else. The gaps are specific and worth naming honestly:

• Single lookups, not screening. virk.dk answers "tell me about this company." It does not answer "give me every company that matches these filters." For segmentation you need a structured dataset or a different tool.
• Documents, not data. Historical financials are PDFs. Turning twenty years of filed accounts into comparable, queryable figures is an extraction project, not a download.
• Danish‑only and Denmark‑only. Field labels and entity types are native; cross‑border consistency — matching a Danish subsidiary to a German parent and a UK sister — is on you. This is the same friction that shows up country by country in our registry API availability by country reference.
• UBO is now conditional. Post‑September‑2025, beneficial‑ownership access needs a lawful basis and authentication. An anonymous pipeline no longer works.

None of this makes registry data worse than aggregated or AI‑generated alternatives — the opposite. It makes it the right foundation, provided someone does the normalisation, linkage, and lawful access layer on top, and exposes it the way modern teams actually consume data — from API to an MCP server for AI agents (see our guide to the best MCP servers for Claude Code). For a fuller treatment of the trade‑offs between pulling registries live versus working from a continuously refreshed store, our piece on live registry APIs versus stored data covers it, and our comparison of registry data providers walks through where each tool wins and loses.

Frequently asked questions