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, 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 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, 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 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.
• 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 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 are a step away.