Sirene database: what France's open business registry says about a business location
The Sirene database is the registry of companies in France and of their business locations. It gives their identity: who exists, and where. It does not say what a location does today.
Contents: the identity of every company (SIREN) and of each of its business locations (SIRET). Price: free, for the files as for the API. Freshness: monthly files, and an API updated every day. Depth: the registry since 1973, closed companies included. Volume: 16.8 million open business locations in the October 1, 2026 file, according to our counts.
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Get the list for my marketPublished on November 2, 2026
In this article
- What is Insee's Sirene database?
- SIREN, SIRET: the company on one side, the business location on the other
- What information does the Sirene registry hold on a business location?
- How to use the Sirene database: downloadable files or API?
- What Sirene data does not say about a business location
- Sirene database: what other sources say
What is Insee's Sirene database?#
The Sirene database is the registry of companies in France and of their business locations. It gives their identity. Insee (France's national statistics office) maintains it and publishes it for free, as open data, under the Licence Ouverte 2.0 (France's open government license) on data.gouv.fr.
The Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (Insee) describes it as "the provider of identity data for companies and business locations."
The word "identity" matters. The database says who exists and where. It does not say what a business location does today. Nor what it is certified to do: a label such as RGE (France's energy-renovation quality mark) is checked in a separate list, covered in our guide to the list of RGE-certified companies.
The volume is large: 30.3 million companies and 44.3 million business locations. These figures come from our counts on Insee's files of November 1, 2026 (companies) and October 1, 2026 (business locations); Insee's page, last updated in October 2024, still says "nearly 25 million companies and 36 million business locations."
In these files, 16.8 million companies are active and 16.8 million business locations are open. The two figures match by coincidence: only 15.1 million companies have an open business location in the October file.
SIREN, SIRET: the company on one side, the business location on the other#
The Sirene registry has two levels. Mixing them up skews any count of French businesses.
The SIREN number identifies the legal unit, that is, the company as a legal person. It has 9 digits.
The first eight carry no meaning; the ninth is a check digit. The number is assigned only once and is never reused, even after the company is dissolved.
The SIRET number identifies a business location, a specific place of business. Its 14 digits read in two parts:
- the SIREN of the company the location belongs to;
- the NIC (internal classification number): a four-digit sequence number, then a check digit.
A company therefore has one SIREN and as many SIRET numbers as it has places of business.
In practice, most companies have only one place. In the business locations file of October 1, 2026, 14.2 million of the 15.1 million companies with at least one open location have just one: more than 9 in 10. The 13,638 companies with 10 or more account for 514,160 open locations, 3% of the total.
Take a made-up example: a chain of three bakeries owned by the same company has one SIREN and three SIRET numbers. In a SIREN database, it counts as one row. In the business locations file, it counts as three.
To find a company's number from its name, see how to find a SIRET number for free.
What information does the Sirene registry hold on a business location?#
The French Commercial Code sets the list of information recorded in the registry, and which of it is public. For a company and its business locations, Sirene data works like a vital-records file for businesses:
- the SIREN and SIRET numbers;
- the registered company name;
- the address;
- the main activity, as an APE code (the activity code assigned by Insee);
- the legal category, in other words the legal form of the legal unit;
- the creation date;
- the employee headcount bracket.
Handle the headcount bracket with care. It is not an exact figure, and it is out of date: since October 1, 2026, the files give the values as of December 31, 2024.
In the October 1, 2026 file, only 81,548 open business locations, 1 in 200, fall in a bracket of 50 employees or more.
The APE code switches to NAF 2025 (the new French activity classification) on January 1, 2027. Since December 16, 2025, the files already show the future code for information, next to the current code. If you segment your accounts by activity, this switch may move part of your filters.
In the October 1, 2026 file, the future code changes only the final letter for 65% of open business locations. For nearly 1 in 20 (833,848), it even changes the first two digits, those of the activity division: these locations even fall outside a broad-sector filter. A filter on the full code is affected for all of them. The details are in our article APE code, NAF code: what changes in 2027.
Chart data
| What the future code changes | Open business locations | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Only the final letter | 10,876,375 | 65% |
| The group or class | 5,116,952 | 30% |
| The division | 833,848 | 5% |
Closed companies and closed business locations stay in the files. That helps for history, but a raw file mixes open and closed places. Keep only the active business locations before you count anything.
The business locations file of October 1, 2026 has 44.3 million rows, of which 27.5 million are closed locations: more than 6 in 10.
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Get the list for my marketHow to use the Sirene database: downloadable files or API?#
Insee makes Sirene registry data available for free, through three channels. The choice depends on how fresh you need the data and on the volume.
| Bulk files | Sirene API | Annuaire des Entreprises (government directory) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you get | A full copy of the database | Answers to your queries | An online search or a list |
| Freshness | Monthly | Daily | More recent than the month's file |
| Format | CSV in a ZIP, or Parquet | Queries from software | Export of a list, up to 200,000 units |
| What for | Analyze the whole registry | Keep a file up to date | Extract a segment without coding |
The Sirene file can be downloaded from the Base Sirene page on data.gouv.fr. There are six monthly bulk files:
- legal units, active and closed;
- business locations, open and closed;
- the history of legal unit values;
- the history of business location values;
- succession links between business locations;
- duplicate SIREN numbers.
A file posted on or after the 1st of the month shows the registry as of the last day of the previous month. It replaces the previous month's file.
Not all files arrive on the same day. Late in the morning of November 2, 2026, the November legal units file was online in Parquet format, but the most recent business locations file was still the one from October 1.
Each ZIP currently holds a CSV, and Parquet (a compact format for large tables) has been offered since June 2025. The dataset page announces that CSV deliverables will stop during the second half of 2027, in favor of Parquet only.
The business locations file of October 1, 2026 weighs 2.9 GB as a ZIP and 2.2 GB in Parquet.
Plan your import scripts accordingly.
Between two files, the Sirene API allows a daily update. To look up a single company without downloading anything, the Annuaire des Entreprises (the government's free company directory) is enough.
What Sirene data does not say about a business location#
The Sirene database says that a place exists. It does not say what goes on there.
The APE code is a declaration, not a visit. It describes the declared main activity. A shop registered for car repair may now only sell cars. A restaurant may have changed concepts without changing its code.
We checked this on 100 open business locations, drawn at random from those for which we have the public business listing, by comparing that listing with the label of the APE code. 58 show the activity of the code (65 if we count 7 readings set aside for lack of an exact quote, which reached the same conclusion). 20 show a related activity, often the same one described differently on the public listing, or, for example, a car dealer whose listing is that of an auto repair shop. 8 belong to another sector, and 6 cannot be decided.
Chart data
| Reading of the public listing | Business locations |
|---|---|
| Activity of the code | 58 |
| Related activity | 20 |
| Another sector | 8 |
| Cannot be decided | 6 |
| Reading set aside | 8 |
A monthly file is always behind. A business location active on the last day of the month may have closed since. The API narrows the gap. It does not close it.
The registry itself records closures late. Among the 140,738 closed business locations whose record was updated in September 2026, for half, the closure dated from August or earlier; for more than 1 in 10, from over a year earlier. Churn never stops: the October 2026 file counts 2.1 million business locations created in 2025 and 1.5 million closed the same year. What this delay means for a prospect file is measured in our guide to keeping CRM records up to date.
Some Sirene registry data is hidden. A person can object to the release of some information, Insee states.
For a sole proprietorship, the last name, first names, pseudonym, storefront name and exact address within the municipality are then no longer released, nor is the geolocation. For a company, the objection only hides the exact location within the municipality.
In the legal units file of November 1, 2026, nearly 3 in 10 active sole proprietorships are only partially disclosed (2.3 million out of 7.8 million), compared with fewer than 2 in 1,000 for companies and other legal entities. On the location side, 2.5 million of the 16.8 million business locations open on October 1, 2026 have their exact address hidden.
Insee does not release the identity of company officers either, even without an objection. Anyone who uses the database must respect the most recent disclosure status.
For a RevOps team, the consequence is simple. A count of business locations is not an addressable market. A row in the database is not a prospect.
Of the 16.8 million business locations open on October 1, 2026, only 2.4 million employ at least one person: the other 6 in 7 report no employees. And nearly half of the companies active on November 1, 2026 (7.8 million out of 16.8 million) are sole proprietorships.
A count belongs to market research. A prospect list is a different deliverable: every row in it is checked, and the real activity of each business is confirmed. To go from one to the other, start with the local addressable market calculator, which builds on our count of auto repair and body shops published in our Observatory blog.
Need the list for your market? We send it with the contact details available, for the scope you choose.
Get the list for my marketSirene database: what other sources say#
Insee's page and our counts on the most recent files do not give the same volume.
| Source | What it counts | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Insee, page "Consulter et télécharger la base Sirene" (Download the Sirene database) | nearly 25 million companies and 36 million business locations | page updated on October 17, 2024 |
| Scalon, legal units file | 30.3 million companies, of which 16.8 million active | file of November 1, 2026 |
| Scalon, business locations file | 44.3 million business locations, of which 16.8 million open | file of October 1, 2026 |
| Scalon, article on the NAF 2025 code | 16.7 million open business locations | file of September 1, 2026 |
The gap with Insee's page is first a matter of its age: the files keep closed companies and closed locations, and grow every month. Yet it exceeds two years of creations (2.1 million business locations created in 2025): the page's figure is probably older than its update date. We could not reconcile it row by row. Our September and October 2026 counts agree: 16.7 then 16.8 million open business locations.
Method#
The volumes come from the bulk files Insee publishes on data.gouv.fr, counted by Scalon on November 2, 2026: legal units of November 1, 2026 (as of October 31), business locations of October 1, 2026 (as of September 30, the most recent online that day). The comparison between APE code and public listing covers open business locations of the registry as Scalon's graph links it to public listings, read on November 2, 2026. Part of it was read a second time.
Method details and limits
File counts: 44,282,364 business location rows, of which 16,827,252 open and 27,455,112 closed (administrative status); 30,280,224 legal units, of which 16,833,577 active. The registry as loaded into Scalon's graph gives 44,283,269 business locations, of which 16,827,762 open, within 0.01% of the file. A company counts as a sole proprietorship when its legal category starts with 1. "Employer" uses the declared employer status of the business location. The code change compares the NAF rev. 2 code with the future NAF 2025 code published for information, on open business locations.
Closure delay: closed business locations whose last processing date in the registry falls in September 2026 (140,738), and the start date of their closed period, compared with September 30, 2026. A record updated in September for a reason other than a closure also counts: the share of closures more than a year old may be slightly overstated. Creations and closures in 2025: creation and closure dates read in the October 2026 file, which does not yet hold closures recorded after September.
APE code and public listing: 16,749 open business locations drawn at random from the graph's registry (one in a thousand, fixed seed), of which 1,585 have a linked public listing; 100 drawn among those whose listing carries a category (seed 20261102). Read by Scalon with the Claude Haiku 5.5 model (Anthropic): public listing (name, category, description) compared with the APE code and its label, with a mandatory quote. Result: 58 same activity, 20 related activity, 8 another sector, 6 undecided, 8 readings rejected for lack of an exact quote (7 of them concluded "same activity"). Scalon reread 20 of them a second time and found the same answer 17 times. On 100 listings, the shares can vary by 5 to 10 points either way. Locations linked to a public listing are more often employers than the file as a whole (875 out of 1,585); a listing wrongly linked to the registry can also count as "another sector."
Cite the study#
The full citation, with counts
Observatoire Scalon, "Sirene database: what France's open business registry says about a business location," November 2, 2026: 30,280,224 legal units in the Sirene file of November 1, 2026, of which 16,833,577 active; 44,282,364 business locations in the file of October 1, 2026, of which 16,827,252 open; out of 100 open business locations read with their public listing, 58 show the activity of their APE code. https://scalon.fr/en/blog/sirene-database
Sources#
- Consulter et télécharger la base Sirene, Insee (page mise à jour le 17 octobre 2024)
- Base Sirene des entreprises et de leurs établissements (SIREN, SIRET), data.gouv.fr, fichiers du 1er octobre 2026 et du 1er novembre 2026
- Demander la modification de son statut de diffusion, Insee
- Réponses à vos questions sur le répertoire Sirene, Insee (question « informations non diffusées »)
- Numéro Siren, définition, Insee
- Numéro Siret, définition, Insee
- APE Code, NAF Code: What Changes in 2027, Observatoire Scalon, October 14, 2026
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