Finding companies in France: Sirene, SIREN/SIRET and the RNE

Propler and France

Propler's company search covers Norway only today. France is not available in the product, and this page does not promise that it will be. It is a guide to the official French sources you can use yourself.

SIREN and SIRET: two levels of identity

France separates the company from its sites more strictly than most countries:

• SIREN is a nine-digit number that identifies the legal unit (unité légale): the company, association or public body.
• SIRET is a fourteen-digit number that identifies each establishment (établissement): the SIREN followed by a five-digit internal number (NIC). A company with a head office, a factory and three shops has one SIREN and five SIRETs.

Both are assigned by INSEE, the national statistics institute, in the Sirene register. Each unit also has an APE code (also called the NAF code), five characters that INSEE assigns for statistical purposes to describe the main activity. INSEE stresses that the APE code creates no legal rights or obligations: it is a presumption of activity, not proof. A new version of the APE code, following the update of the European NACE classification, takes effect on 1 January 2027, so expect industry codes to change.

The French intra-community VAT number is built from the SIREN: FR, a two-digit key, and the nine-digit SIREN.

Where to look companies up

• Annuaire des Entreprises (annuaire-entreprises.data.gouv.fr), run by the government's digital directorate (DINUM), is the free public directory that brings together the public data the administration holds on a company, including Sirene and the RNE. INSEE's old sirene.fr site closed in December 2025, and its search and list extraction moved here.
• The Sirene API and files. INSEE's Sirene API is free, and the complete Sirene database can be downloaded from data.gouv.fr. The Annuaire also offers an open company search API (API Recherche d'entreprises) with a per-IP rate limit.
• DATA INPI (data.inpi.fr) gives free access to the Registre national des entreprises (RNE), run by INPI. Since 1 January 2023 businesses in France register in the RNE through a single online one-stop shop (Guichet unique). DATA INPI shows legal details such as legal form, share capital and registered address, filed company acts and annual accounts, and lets you download a free registration certificate. Bulk data is available through APIs and SFTP.

Annual accounts and the confidentiality option

Commercial companies file their annual accounts with the commercial court registry, and the accounts are then available through the RNE. But France lets smaller companies keep them out of public view:

• Micro-enterprises can ask for their whole annual accounts to be kept confidential.
• Small companies that are not micro-enterprises can ask for the profit and loss account (compte de résultat) to be kept confidential.
• Medium-sized companies cannot make their accounts confidential, but can publish a simplified balance sheet and notes.

Some companies, for example those in groups, credit institutions and insurers, are excluded from the option. Confidential accounts remain available to public authorities, the courts and the Banque de France, but not to you. In practice this means that for many small French companies you will find no public revenue figure at all. That is a choice the company has made, not missing data you can find elsewhere.

Non-diffusible entries

Individual entrepreneurs can object to the public distribution of their data in Sirene. For such units, INSEE masks the name, trade name, exact address and geolocation while other information remains public. INSEE asks reusers to respect the latest diffusion status and not to redistribute masked data for prospecting. If you work with Sirene files, filter on the diffusion status before you build any list.

Prospecting in France

1. Decide whether you sell to the company (SIREN) or to sites (SIRET). Purchasing decisions are often taken at head office, but services such as maintenance are bought per site.
2. Filter Sirene by APE code, location, legal form, size band and status.
3. Check the RNE on DATA INPI for directors, filings and, where public, accounts.
4. Expect confidential accounts for many small companies and size them by other signals: employee band, number of establishments, website, job ads.

For public contracts, French buyers publish notices on BOAMP, the official bulletin of public procurement notices, which offers free search and alerts; larger contracts also appear on the EU's TED (see Europe).

B2B e-mail and GDPR in France

The CNIL, France's data protection authority, describes a specific regime for B2B prospecting by e-mail. Prospecting professionals without prior consent is possible on the basis of legitimate interest if the message relates to the recipient's profession, the person is told where their data came from and why, and they can easily object. Every message must identify the sender and include a simple way to opt out, and the CNIL recommends keeping a suppression list of people who have objected.

The GDPR applies in full whenever you process a named person's data, including an individual entrepreneur's.

Where to go next

If your priority is the Norwegian market, it is live in Propler: see the Norway market page. For the list-building method, read building a qualified B2B prospect list.