How to check a German company before you pay it

Where German companies are registered

German companies are registered with their local court (Amtsgericht): HRB numbers for corporations such as GmbH, UG and AG, HRA for registered partnerships and sole traders. Since August 2022 anyone can read the register free of charge at the common portal of the federal states, handelsregister.de. No login, no fee for the standard printouts.

One thing to know up front: the register number alone is not unique across Germany. "HRB 12345" exists at many courts, so you need the name plus the court, or the name plus the city.

The check, step by step

1. Get three things from the supplier: the exact legal name including the legal-form suffix (GmbH, UG (haftungsbeschränkt), GmbH & Co. KG, AG), the register court and number (for example "Amtsgericht München, HRB 123456"), and the VAT ID (USt-IdNr., DE plus nine digits). German businesses are required to put all of this on a proper invoice, so asking is entirely normal.
2. Search on handelsregister.de. Use the normal search; the portal offers an English interface, though the documents themselves are German. Search by register number plus court, or by name plus city. Try the name with and without umlauts (Müller and Mueller) if the first attempt finds nothing.
3. Open the current printout ("AD"). This is the live extract: legal name, registered seat, business address, share capital, the managing directors (Geschäftsführer) or management board (Vorstand), and who holds signing authority (Prokura). Viewing it is free.
4. Check status and recent changes. A company in liquidation carries "i.L." after its name. The chronological printout ("CD") shows recent entries such as a change of managing director or a moved seat; fresh changes right before a large prepayment are worth a question.
5. Cross-check the Impressum. German law requires business websites to carry a legal notice (Impressum) stating the legal name, register court and number, the managing directors, and the VAT ID. Compare it line by line with the register entry. A "German supplier" whose site has no Impressum, or whose Impressum names a different company, is a serious flag.
6. Confirm that accounts exist. Annual accounts are not on the register portal; they are published at unternehmensregister.de. You are not doing financial analysis here; you are checking that a company of the claimed age and size has been publishing anything at all.
7. Validate the VAT ID in VIES. A German quirk: for DE numbers VIES returns only valid or invalid, with no name or address, so a valid result cannot by itself be tied to the company. Our VIES guide covers what validation does and does not prove.

Why this is harder from abroad

• The portal is built for individual lookups in a browser. There is no official public API, sessions expire, and the portal's terms cap how many searches a visitor may run per hour. Fine for checking one supplier, deliberately unsuited to anything bulk.
• The printouts are German legal text with court abbreviations (AD, CD, HD, SI) that take some decoding, and machine translation of legal terms is imperfect.
• Ownership is less visible than in the UK. There is no free public search equivalent to the UK's PSC register: a GmbH's shareholder list is a filed document, and access to the beneficial-ownership register is restricted.
• As everywhere: the register cannot tell you whether the person emailing you is connected to the registered company, and it never shows bank details. Confirm the account by phone on a number from the Impressum or the register, not from the email thread. If the bank details ever "change", use the bank-detail change checklist first.

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