How is a company registered?
The answer
Registration is the act that turns a business idea into a legal person. A government official enters your company in a public register and issues a certificate with a number on it. From that moment the company can own things, owe things, sue and be sued in its own name. Before that moment, only you can.
Why this costs you money
Registration is not approval. A registrar checks that your form is complete, that your name is available and that your documents are signed. It does not check whether your business is a good idea, whether you have any money, or whether anything you say about yourself is true. "We are a registered company" is a statement about paperwork, and people send money on the strength of it.
The registered address. Every company must give an address where the government and the courts can serve documents. Founders use a friend's flat, a co-working desk they later leave, or an office they moved out of 2 years ago. Notices go there. Nobody reads them. The company is marked in default, then struck off, and the directors find out when a bank refuses a transaction. This is one of the most common ways small companies die, and it is entirely administrative.
A company name is not a trademark. The registrar tells you whether a name is already registered as a company name. It does not tell you whether somebody owns it as a trademark. Founders register a company, print the packaging, build the website, and receive a legal notice 8 months later.
How it works
Every country does the same 6 things, in a different order with different form numbers. Learn the 6 and the local detail becomes lookup, not learning.
1. Choose the form. Private company, public company, LLP, LLC, corporation. Articles 3 to 8 of this cluster are that decision.
2. Choose a name and get it cleared. The registrar checks it against existing names and against rules on identical or misleading names. Clearance at the company registrar is not trademark clearance and never has been.
3. Identify the people. The state wants to know who the directors, partners or members are. India verifies this hard: every director needs a Director Identification Number tied to their PAN, plus a digital signature. Most US states verify almost nothing about the individuals.
4. Fix an address. A registered office in India. A registered agent with a physical address in the state, in the United States. This is the address for legal service, and it is the field people treat most carelessly.
5. File the constitution. In India, the Memorandum of Association and the Articles of Association. In the United States, the Articles or Certificate of Incorporation, plus bylaws kept internally.
6. Get the tax identity. In India, PAN and TAN, issued through the same incorporation form. In the United States, an Employer Identification Number from the Internal Revenue Service, obtained separately afterwards.
Then the registrar issues a certificate of incorporation with a permanent number. That number is the company's identity for life. It does not change when the company changes its name, its business, its owners or its address.
What a registrar is, and is not. A record keeper with a checklist. Its job is that the register is accurate and public. It is not a gatekeeper of business quality and it does not vouch for you. The value of the register is that anybody can read it — which is why the exercise below works.
What it tells you, and what it does not
A registration number tells you the country, usually the year, often the state, and in India the exact form of the company and whether it is listed.
It does not tell you the company is solvent, active or honest. Those are separate fields, and 2 of them are worth checking every time.
It does not tell you the company may legally do what it is doing. Registration is not a licence. In investing this matters constantly: an investment adviser must be registered with the regulator, and "we are a registered company" is not that registration.
And it does not tell you who really owns it. In India the register names directors, and shareholding is filed annually. In most US states nothing about ownership is filed at all.
The decision rule
Whenever a company asks you for money — as a customer, a supplier, an employee or an investor — spend 2 minutes on the register and check 3 fields.
Status. Active, or something else. Anything else is a stop.
Date of incorporation. Compare it with what the company implies about itself. A business advertising "20 years of trust" and incorporated 14 months ago is telling you something.
Last filing date. A company that has not filed for years is either dormant or badly run, and you cannot tell which until it matters.
Try this now
Four minutes, on a company you bought something from this week.
- Find an invoice, bill, or website footer of an Indian company. Under Section 12(3)(c) of the Companies Act 2013, an Indian company must print its CIN on its letters, bills and website. Find the 21-character string. It looks like
L17110MH1973PLC019786. - Decode it, left to right:
- Character 1 —
Lmeans listed on a stock exchange.Umeans not listed. - Characters 2 to 6 — a 5-digit industry code.
- Characters 7 and 8 — the state of the registered office.
MHMaharashtra,DLDelhi,KAKarnataka,TNTamil Nadu. - Characters 9 to 12 — the year of incorporation.
- Characters 13 to 15 — the form.
PTCprivate limited,PLCpublic limited,FTCa subsidiary of a foreign company,OPCone person company,NPLnot for profit,GOIandSGCgovernment owned. - Characters 16 to 21 — the registration number given by the Registrar.
- Check yourself. Open the Ministry of Corporate Affairs website, go to MCA Services, then View Company/LLP Master Data, and paste the CIN in.
- For a US company: open SEC EDGAR at sec.gov, open the most recent Form 10-K, and read the cover page. It states the state of incorporation and the IRS Employer Identification Number. Then search "[that state] Secretary of State business entity search" for its status and registered agent.
What you should see. The first character tells you instantly whether the company is listed, which is the question people usually go 3 clicks to answer.
The year is often not what you assumed. Brands are often much older or much younger than the legal person behind them.
The state is often not where you thought the company was based.
And if you see FTC, you are dealing with the Indian subsidiary of a foreign company — worth knowing, because your contract is with the Indian entity and not with the global parent whose name is on the box.
Three real cases
1. Delaware, from 1899 (United States) — a register built as an industry Delaware passed a General Corporation Law in 1899 designed to attract companies away from New Jersey, then kept it modern and paired it with a specialist court, the Court of Chancery, that hears company disputes without a jury. The result is that a very large share of major US corporations are registered in a small state most of them have no operations in. Registration is not a formality there. It is a product, and companies buy it deliberately.
2. India, SPICe+, from February 2020 — many forms become one The Ministry of Corporate Affairs replaced a chain of separate applications with a single integrated web form. One submission now covers name reservation, incorporation, Director Identification Numbers, PAN, TAN, and through a linked form provident fund and state insurance registration, a bank account and optional GST registration. The forms did not get simpler. They got collected, which is a different and more valuable thing.
3. Estonia, e-Residency from December 2014 — registration without a country Estonia began issuing digital identities to non-residents, letting a person anywhere register and run an Estonian company online. Tens of thousands of companies have been formed this way by people who have never visited the country. Advertisements offering Indian founders a company registered abroad "in 15 minutes" usually point at something like this, and the registration genuinely is fast. What is not fast is Indian tax residence, the Reserve Bank of India's overseas investment rules, and reporting obligations at home. Registering a company somewhere is easy. Being allowed to own it from where you live is a separate question.
The question that resolves it
A novice sees "registered company" and asks: is this legitimate?
An expert asks: registered where, as what, since when, and are the filings up to date?
Every one of those has a public answer that takes under 2 minutes, and together they answer the first question far better than the word "registered" ever could.
What would make this wrong
If registration created any obligation on the registrar to check the substance of a business, then a registered company would carry some assurance and this article would be too dismissive. Neither the Indian Registrar of Companies nor any US Secretary of State makes such a check.
The honest limits are 3.
First, registration does check some things. India verifies the identity of every director against PAN and requires a digital signature, which makes an anonymous Indian company much harder to create than an anonymous US one.
Second, a struck-off company is not always a fraud. Very many small companies are incorporated by hopeful founders and quietly abandoned. The practical consequence to you is the same: there is nobody to recover from.
Third, registration abroad is not a way around your own rules. Where you are tax resident, where your management sits, and what your home country's exchange control rules say all continue to apply.
In India
Who registers. The Ministry of Corporate Affairs, through the Registrars of Companies in the states and the Central Registration Centre, which handles name approval and incorporation processing centrally.
The instrument. Section 7 of the Companies Act 2013 governs incorporation. The application is the SPICe+ web form: Part A for name reservation, Part B for incorporation and the linked services.
What you get. A certificate of incorporation carrying the CIN, plus a PAN and a TAN, all issued together.
What you must do immediately after.
- Registered office. Under Section 12, the company must have an office capable of receiving communications, and file verification of it.
- Commencement of business. Under Section 10A, a company with share capital must file Form INC-20A within 180 days, confirming the subscribers have paid in the share money. Until it is filed, the company must not begin business or borrow.
- First auditor, appointed within 30 days of incorporation.
What registration does not include. Trademark registration, which is a separate application to the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks. Sectoral licences. Import-export code. Shop and establishment registration in some states.
In the United States
Who registers. The Secretary of State of whichever state you choose. There is no federal company register and no federal incorporation.
The instrument. A Certificate of Incorporation or Articles of Incorporation for a corporation, or a Certificate of Formation for an LLC. It is short — often 1 or 2 pages — naming the company, its purpose, its registered agent, and the shares it is authorised to issue.
The registered agent. Every state requires a person or company with a physical address in that state who accepts legal documents on the company's behalf. It is a paid service, commonly $50 to $300 a year, and it is what allows a Delaware company to have no presence in Delaware.
The tax identity. The EIN comes from the Internal Revenue Service, not the state, on Form SS-4. It is free. An applicant with a US taxpayer identification number can get one online in minutes. An applicant without one applies by fax or post, and this is where foreign founders get stuck.
Bylaws. Not filed with the state. The corporation adopts them internally. Most disputes in a small US corporation are decided by a document the public never sees.
Foreign qualification. A company registered in one state that does business in another must register there too, as a "foreign" entity — foreign meaning out of state. Skipping it can mean losing the right to bring a lawsuit in that state.
Where they differ, and what that tells you
First, India verifies people. The United States mostly does not. Every Indian director is tied to a PAN, an identity document and a digital signature before the company exists. In most US states an incorporator can file without any individual being publicly named, and the federal beneficial ownership reporting rule that briefly changed this was rolled back in 2025 and finalised in 2026.
The consequence is direct. You can usually find out who runs an Indian company and usually cannot find out who owns an American LLC. If you are dealing with a US entity you have never met, get that information contractually instead.
Second, India bundles the tax identity into incorporation. The United States does not. An Indian company has a PAN on the day it is born. A US company exists at the state level and then has to go and get an EIN, and cannot open a bank account until it does. For a founder outside the United States, that gap is the most common reason a company sits registered and unusable for weeks.
What that tells you is where to expect the delay. In India, the hard part is before incorporation — documents, digital signatures, and a name that clears. Once the certificate issues you are almost operational. In the United States, the incorporation is trivially fast and the hard part is afterwards: EIN, bank account, and registration in every state you actually operate in.
Carry this
- Registration creates a legal person. It does not create approval, a licence or a trademark.
- Every system does the same 6 things: form, name, people, address, constitution, tax identity.
- Before you send money to any company, check 3 fields: status, incorporation date, last filing date.