---
title: "What a company's status actually means: Active, Strike Off, Dormant"
description: "Strike Off means the company has been removed from the MCA register and no longer legally exists. What Active, Strike Off and Dormant mean, and what to do next."
author: "Pradeep Vanga"
published: 2026-09-09
updated: 2026-09-09
category: "Guide"
tags: ["company-status", "strike-off", "due-diligence"]
canonical: https://entiva.in/blog/company-status-strike-off-meaning/
publisher: "Entiva"
---

# What a company's status actually means: Active, Strike Off, Dormant

Before you sign a contract, pay an invoice, accept a job offer or hand over a
deposit, there's one field worth checking. It takes seconds and costs nothing:
the company's **status** on the register.

**Short answer:** a company whose status reads **Strike Off** has been removed
from the register and has ceased to legally exist. It can't lawfully transact,
so there is no legal entity to contract with. The detail, and what Active and
Dormant mean, follows below.

It's a single word, and it's decisive. It is also the field that matters most
in the [two-minute check on whether a company is real](https://entiva.in/blog/how-to-check-if-a-company-is-real/), which is where to start if you
have never looked a company up before.

Because here's the uncomfortable bit. A company can have a polished website, an
active sales team and a plausible office address while being, in law, no longer a
company at all. The website doesn't know. The register does.

One thing to get right before you start: make sure you're looking at the company
you think you are. Near-identical names are common across states, so confirm the
entity by [its CIN](https://entiva.in/blog/how-to-read-a-cin-number/) rather than by name.

## The statuses you'll actually see

**Active.** The company exists and is on the register.

Now notice what that does *not* say. It isn't a statement that the company is
trading, or solvent, or filing on time. Active is a legal status, not a health
check. More on that in a moment, because it's where most people trip.

**Strike Off / Struck Off.** The company has been removed from the register and
has ceased to legally exist. The registrar's grounds under section 248(1) are
that the company never commenced business within a year of incorporation, or
has not been carrying on any business or operation for the two preceding
financial years, or the subscribers never paid for their shares. A company can
also apply to be struck off itself. Note that non-filing is not a ground in
itself; it is the evidence a registrar reads as showing the company is not
carrying on business. Its assets
are frozen and it can't lawfully transact, sell or transfer anything.

This is not a rare status. In our snapshot of the register,
[more than one in four entities carries a strike-off status](https://entiva.in/blog/how-many-companies-in-india-are-still-active/),
which makes it the second most common word on the whole register after Active.

**Under Process of Striking Off.** The removal has started but isn't finished.
This is a company on its way out, and you should read it much the way you'd read
Struck Off.

**Dormant.** The company applied for dormant status and was granted it. Think of
it as a company putting itself in hibernation: a formal way of staying in
existence while doing nothing. Unlike Strike Off, this is a deliberate,
compliant choice. But a dormant company is by definition not trading.

**Amalgamated / Dissolved / Liquidated.** The company ended by a specific legal
route rather than being administratively removed. Whoever you were dealing with
is now someone else, or no one.

Those are the ones you will meet most. The register actually uses twenty-three
different status values, several of them citing the Insolvency and Bankruptcy
Code rather than the Companies Act, and
[every one of them is set out here](https://entiva.in/blog/mca-company-status-list-explained/)
with the law behind it and how many companies carry it.

## What to do when you see each one

| Status | What it means for you |
| --- | --- |
| Active | Proceed, and keep checking. Status says nothing about filings or solvency |
| Strike Off | Stop. There's no legal entity to contract with |
| Under Process of Striking Off | Stop and ask directly what's happening |
| Dormant | Ask why. A dormant company shouldn't be invoicing you |
| Amalgamated / Dissolved | Establish which entity you're actually dealing with now |

## The trap: Active is not a clean bill of health

This is where quick checks go wrong. Someone looks up a company, sees
**Active**, and treats the question as closed.

Active only means the registrar hasn't removed it. That's a low bar.

A company can sit at Active while having filed no accounts for three years,
while carrying charges against every asset it owns, and while every original
director has resigned. None of that shows up in the status field. It's a pulse
check, not a physical.

So status is the *first* check, not the only one. Once it reads Active, the
questions that actually carry risk are these.

- **Is it filing?** A gap in annual filings is the most reliable early signal
  that something's off, and you can see it just from which filings exist.
- **What does it earn?** That's in the audited accounts attached to the annual
  filing. See
  [how to find a private company's revenue](https://entiva.in/blog/how-to-find-a-private-company-revenue-india/).
- **Who runs it now?** Director appointments and resignations are filed with
  dates, so you can read the board's history in sequence.
- **What has it pledged?** Charges over assets are registered. An unreleased
  charge from years ago is a common and expensive surprise.

## Check the status, not the story

Everything a company tells you about itself is presentation. The register is the
one place where its legal existence is a matter of record.

Checking costs nothing and takes one search. There's no good reason to take a
counterparty's word for it instead.

You can [look up any Indian company or LLP on Entiva](https://entiva.in/) free and see its status,
CIN, incorporation date and state straight away. When the answer is Active and
you need to know what's sitting behind it, [the filings the registrar
holds](https://entiva.in/what-you-can-find/) are a step away.

## Related reading

- [How to check if a company is real before you give them money](https://entiva.in/blog/how-to-check-if-a-company-is-real/): Verify an Indian company for free. A quarter of the entities on the register no longer legally exist, so here is how to check the one in front of you in about two minutes.
- [How many companies and LLPs are registered in India?](https://entiva.in/blog/how-many-companies-in-india-are-still-active/): Our July 2026 snapshot counts 3,123,764 companies and 550,550 LLPs. See the Active and Strike Off totals, with the dataset's limits.
- [Every company status on the MCA register, and what each one actually means](https://entiva.in/blog/mca-company-status-list-explained/): The register uses 23 status values, not five. Here is every one, the section of law behind it, and the ACTIVE-compliance tag that is not a status at all.

_Published by Entiva (https://entiva.in/), which retrieves documents from the Ministry of Corporate Affairs' View Public Documents service on a customer's behalf. Entiva is not affiliated with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs and does not resell another provider's database. Free lookups use MCA company master data._