Search Belgian Companies: CBE, KBO & National Bank Data

Belgium quietly runs one of the most generous company registers in Europe. The basic data is free, and the financials — full, standardized annual accounts — are free to download too. For a compliance or KYB team, that is rare.

There is a catch, and it is structural. Belgian company data is split across two institutions: the Crossroads Bank for Enterprises holds the identity, and the National Bank holds the financials. Miss the second and you have half a profile. And as elsewhere in the EU, the beneficial-owners register has been closed to the public since 2023 — while the cross-border group structure, the thing that matters most for a holding-company hub like Belgium, sits in no single register at all.

This guide covers what each registry holds, what is free and what is paid, how the free financials work, and where the picture goes dark.

Where the data lives

The starting point is the Crossroads Bank for Enterprises (CBE) — in French the Banque-Carrefour des Entreprises (BCE), in Dutch the Kruispuntbank van Ondernemingen (KBO). It is the central register owned by the FPS Economy, holding the basic data on every Belgian entity and its establishment units. You consult it free through CBE Public Search, available in English, French, Dutch and German.

Everything hangs off one identifier: the enterprise number, a 10-digit code in the format 0xxx.xxx.xxx, assigned at registration and used across the tax authority, social security and the courts. It is also the basis of the Belgian VAT number — prefix it with “BE” and you have the VAT ID. (For formats across borders, see our VAT number formats by country.) Each physical location is a separate establishment unit with its own number.

How many companies exist

At the end of 2024 there were 1,187,819 VAT-registered enterprises in Belgium, growing 1.6% on the year; by the end of 2025 the figure had passed 1.2 million. The flow is healthy but the gap is narrowing: 113,289 new businesses were created in 2024, while 94,532 ceased — the latter up 6.8% on the year.

Those exits raise a question the registers above don’t answer: how do you check whether a specific company is actually in trouble? Belgian insolvency proceedings — bankruptcies and judicial reorganisations — are recorded in RegSol, the Central Solvency Register, the mandatory national platform run for the courts since 2017. It is the authentic national source, with more than 90,000 files processed; its public section is free to consult and ties each case to the company’s enterprise number, the court judgment and the appointed trustee — a fourth place to look, separate again from the CBE and the National Bank.

The company types you will meet

Belgium overhauled its company law in 2019. The Code of Companies and Associations cut the number of forms to seven and made the BV/SRL the default. Existing companies had until 1 January 2024 to convert; abolished forms were converted by law.

The list is rounded out by the European Company (SE) and European Cooperative (SCE), plus the maatschap / société simple — a partnership without legal personality often used for family wealth planning, which leaves a lighter public footprint. Belgium also applies the incorporation theory: a company with its registered office in Belgium is governed by Belgian law, wherever it is actually managed.

What is free vs paid

Belgium leans open. The bulk of what a compliance team needs costs nothing.

• Free. CBE Public Search for identity, status, directors, activities and links; the KBO Open Data bulk files (CSV, daily since late 2025, free with a quick sign-up); the National Bank’s annual accounts, free to consult and download; and the Belgian Official Gazette (Moniteur belge / Belgisch Staatsblad) for incorporations, deeds and appointments; and the public section of RegSol, the national insolvency register, for bankruptcies and judicial reorganisations.
• Paid. Certified CBE extracts and certain professional web services. The National Pledge Register charges about EUR 5 per search to check security registered over a company’s movable assets. Several commercial providers also repackage the same public data into reports and APIs.
• Closed. The UBO register — covered below.

Two cautions. Systematic scraping of Public Search is prohibited and carries real fines, so bulk use means the official open-data channel, not the web portal. And the register is largely self-declared — though the CBE cross-syncs identity data with the National Register and social security, and strikes off entities that fail to file accounts or UBO data.

The free financials

This is where Belgium stands out. Most legal entities must file annual accounts — not with the CBE, but with the National Bank’s Central Balance Sheet Office. The accounts must go to the general meeting within six months of the financial year end, then be filed within 30 days of approval and at the latest within seven months of year end. Late filing adds a surcharge to the filing fee.

What you get is unusually rich. Accounts are filed against standardized models — full, abridged or micro, set by company size — and around 99% arrive as structured XBRL, so the data is machine-readable, not a flat scan. The filing carries the balance sheet, profit-and-loss account, explanatory notes, the social balance sheet, and, importantly, the shareholder structure and participations. Consulting and downloading a company’s accounts is free, and an English filing is often available. Some unlimited-liability forms, such as the VOF/SNC, are not required to file at all.

Owners and the closed register

Belgium gives more ownership visibility than it first appears — but not where you would expect. The CBE does not publish shareholders. The shareholder structure is disclosed instead in the annual-accounts filing at the National Bank, alongside the company’s participations. It is a yearly snapshot, and for a group entity the named holder is often another company rather than a person.

The ultimate beneficial owners sit in a separate register — the UBO register, run by the FPS Finance, where every company must declare the natural persons who own or control more than 25%. Since the November 2022 CJEU ruling, and Belgium’s implementing law of February 2023, it is closed to the public.

For how this compares across the bloc, see our guide to beneficial ownership registers worldwide and the timeline in what AMLD6 changes.

The corporate linkage gap

Belgium sits at the centre of Europe, and its tax and holding regimes have long made it a base for multinational holding, finance and coordination entities. So a large share of Belgian companies are one node in a group that runs across borders. The CBE records links between Belgian entities — but a national register, by design, stops at the border.

What’s changing

Four shifts are worth tracking.

• The company-law reform is fully in. Every existing company had to align with the 2019 Code by 1 January 2024; abolished forms were converted by operation of law, so old forms you find in historical filings may now read differently.
• UBO went private, then got teeth. Public access ended in February 2023; a year later, around 21,000 entities were struck off for failing to file beneficial-ownership data.
• Open data sped up. Since late 2025 the KBO Open Data files are published daily, with an SFTP channel — useful for keeping a copy of the register current.
• Classifications moved. Belgium is migrating activity codes to NACE-BEL 2025, so a company’s recorded activity codes may have changed even if its business has not.
• Foreign investment is now screened. Since 1 July 2023 a national FDI-screening regime requires non-EU investors to notify certain stakes in Belgian companies in sensitive sectors — a step that did not exist before.

In the background, the EU’s new AML package (the AMLR and AMLD6) applies in full from 10 July 2027, and is meant to standardise legitimate-interest access across the bloc — though implementation will vary by country.

How to access Belgian data at scale

One company at a time, Belgium’s free portals are excellent. At scale — onboarding, monitoring, due diligence across many entities — the friction is the split itself: identity in one place, financials in another, owners behind a wall, and group structure spread across foreign registers. For how access differs country by country, see our business-registry API map, the directory of European registries, and the broader guide to searching for company information across the EU. For neighbouring jurisdictions, compare the Dutch KVK, the French RCS, and the German Handelsregister; for the EU-wide layer, see BRIS and its alternatives.

What the registers won’t tell you

Belgium is one of the more open registers in Europe. The gaps are less about price and more about where the data sits.

Each gap is a place where a multi-jurisdiction, registry-direct layer earns its keep — joining the CBE to the National Bank, adding owners where lawful, and placing a Belgian entity inside its global group.

Frequently asked questions