The Irish company register and CRO explained

What the CRO does

The Companies Registration Office is the State body responsible for Ireland’s register of companies. It sits under the Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment. Its main jobs are to:

• incorporate new companies and register business names and limited partnerships;
• receive the documents companies must file after registration, such as annual returns, financial statements, changes of director and changes of registered office;
• enforce filing obligations, including striking off companies that do not file and prosecuting persistent defaulters;
• make register information available to the public.

What is on the register

The register covers every company incorporated in Ireland, plus external companies with an Irish branch. In the CRO open data (CRO open data, September 2026) there are about 825,000 companies, of which about 326,000 have the status Normal (active) and about 476,000 are dissolved. Between about 21,000 and 27,000 new companies have been registered each year since 2019.

Using CORE

CORE (core.cro.ie) is the CRO’s online service. Anyone can search it by company name or number. Copies of filed documents can be bought there, and a free CORE account lets companies and agents file forms online and track their filings.

Most filings are now online only, including annual returns (Form B1), change of registered office (B2), changes of directors and secretary (B10), restoration (H1) and voluntary strike-off (H15).

Which source to use

• Finding a company or its number, checking it is on the register, or comparing companies by place or industry: CompanyCheck. See the county pages and industry pages.
• Seeing who the directors are, reading accounts or getting a certified document: buy it on CORE.
• Finding who ultimately owns or controls a company: the Register of Beneficial Ownership is separate from the CRO register, and access is restricted.
• Checking a sole trader or trading name: search business names on CORE.

How CompanyCheck uses CRO data

CompanyCheck is an independent site. It is not run by the CRO or connected to it. Register fields come from the CRO’s open data, published under a Creative Commons Attribution licence and refreshed on CompanyCheck daily. Each company profile says when the data was retrieved.

Some profiles also include a website, phone number or short description gathered from the company’s own public website. Those details are labelled separately from register data and are not part of the CRO record.