How many companies in India actually still exist?

More than one in four entities on India’s companies register no longer legally exists.

Not dormant. Not struggling. Removed. 939,392 of them carry the status Strike Off, and another 27,194 are on their way out. Against a register of more than 3.7 million entities, that is 26.3% either gone or going.

The number that gets quoted in the press is the size of the register itself. It is the least interesting number on this page.

Where the figure comes from

The Ministry of Corporate Affairs publishes a company master file: one row per registered entity, with its identifier, name, date of registration, state and current status. We hold a snapshot of it, downloaded on 8 September 2026, and everything below is a count over that file.

Three things about it before any conclusion is drawn from it.

It is a snapshot, and it is older than its download date. We pulled the file on 8 September 2026, but the resource itself records its last update as 22 July 2026. So these numbers describe the register as MCA published it in July, not as it stood on the day we downloaded it. Two different dates, and the earlier one is the one that governs what the figures mean.

They are not all companies. They are entities, and they are not all the same kind of thing. Roughly 3.1 million carry a 21-character CIN, which is a company. About 550,000 carry the shorter LLP-style identifier, which is a limited liability partnership. Anyone who quotes the full figure as a count of companies has quietly folded in half a million LLPs.

And it is missing a state. We found this after publishing, by counting the same register from the Ministry’s own figures. The published copy counted here carries a single entity with a Chhattisgarh CIN, where the Ministry’s own figures give 21,465 companies and 2,537 LLPs. They are not filed under a neighbouring state. They are simply absent.

That is 24,002 entities the counts below do not contain, about two-thirds of one per cent of the file. We have measured what putting them back would do rather than assuming it is nothing: Active moves from 70.70% to 70.76% and Strike Off from 25.57% to 25.52%. Nothing in the state table changes place, because Chhattisgarh’s total is an order of magnitude below the sixth state in it. So the counts stand as published rather than being quietly restated, with one honest qualification: the missing state is healthier than the register average, 79.9% Active against 70.7%, so its absence makes the struck-off share here very slightly worse than the truth, not better.

The row count matches the resource’s own reported total exactly, and that is worth stating plainly for what it is now known to be worth. A file can agree with its own published total and still be missing a state, which is what happened here. Internal consistency is not completeness, and it is not a check on any individual figure below. We have not been able to re-query the source value by value either, because the source’s own filter interface times out against a file this size.

The whole register, by status

Every distinct status value in the snapshot, with its count. This is the full vocabulary the register actually uses, which turns out to be considerably wider than the handful of words most people have met. What each string means, and the ACTIVE-compliance tag that is not a status, is in every company status on the MCA register.

Status	Entities	Share
Active	2,597,823	70.70%
Strike Off	939,392	25.57%
Amalgamated	40,195	1.09%
Converted to LLP	29,512	0.80%
Under process of striking off	27,194	0.74%
Dissolved (Liquidated)	11,970	0.33%
Inactive for e-filing	10,261	0.28%
Under Liquidation	8,515	0.23%
Dormant under section 455	2,595	0.07%
Converted and Dissolved	1,953	0.05%
Under CIRP	1,944	0.05%
Dissolved under section 59(8)	983	0.03%
Converted to CMP and Dissolved	981	0.03%
Dissolved under section 54	507	0.01%
Inactive	202	0.01%
Dissolved	186	0.01%
Strike Off-AwaitingPublication	83	0.00%
Not available for efiling	13	0.00%
Unclassified	1	0.00%
Vanished	1	0.00%
Under Process Of Strike Off	1	0.00%
Not available for E-filing	1	0.00%
Converted to LLP and Dissolved	1	0.00%

A few of those deserve a second look.

Dormant under section 455 is almost nobody. 2,595 entities, seven in every ten thousand. Dormancy is the register’s polite, formal way of going quiet, and in practice companies do not use it. They simply stop filing and wait to be struck off. That is worth knowing when you see the word: it is rare enough that somebody made a deliberate choice.

Under CIRP is 1,944. That is every entity in the register currently inside a corporate insolvency resolution process. Set against 939,392 struck off, it tells you how Indian companies actually end. Formal insolvency is the exception. Quiet administrative removal is the rule.

And there is one entity with the status “Vanished”. Exactly one. We are not going to name it.

Note also the untidiness: “Not available for efiling” and “Not available for E-filing” are the same status typed twice, and “Under process of striking off” appears once more with different capitalisation. A register assembled over decades carries its history in its spelling.

What one in four does not mean

This is the part where the number gets misread, so let us close the exits.

It does not mean a quarter of Indian businesses failed. Strike off is an administrative removal, most often for not filing, and a company can be struck off while the people behind it simply moved on, incorporated something else, or never traded at all. Many were shelf companies that existed to be a company and nothing more.

It does not mean the remaining 70.7% are trading. Active is a legal status. It means the registrar has not removed the entity. It says nothing about whether the company has employees, revenue, or a pulse. We have written separately about what each status actually means for someone about to sign something, and the short version is that Active is the floor, not the ceiling.

And it does not mean the register is unreliable. It means the register is doing its job. Strike off is how a companies register stays honest about which entities are still there.

The cohort effect, which is the real finding

Split the register by the year each entity was registered, and ask what share of each year’s intake has since been struck off.

Registered in	Entities	Since struck off
2000	32,378	55.6%
2005	51,149	42.3%
2010	88,827	45.0%
2012	107,625	52.2%
2015	101,673	36.0%
2018	140,487	11.8%
2020	178,938	18.7%
2022	206,996	3.6%
2024	236,833	1.6%
2025	318,200	0.4%

More than half of the companies registered in 2012 are gone. So are more than half of the class of 2000.

Now the caution, because this table invites exactly one wrong conclusion. The rate falls off for recent years not because newer companies are healthier but because strike off takes time. A company has to stop filing, stay stopped, be noticed, be served notice, and be published before the status changes. A company incorporated in 2025 has not had the opportunity. Read the recent rows as “not yet”, not as “surviving”.

What the older rows tell you is the honest long-run figure, and it is roughly this: give an Indian company two decades and about half of them will have been removed from the register.

One more thing in that table. 318,200 entities were registered in 2025, the highest single year in the series, and the snapshot already holds 163,306 for 2026 by the eighth of September. Whatever else is true, the register is growing faster than it is being cleaned.

Where they are, and what they are

Of the roughly 3.1 million entities with a full CIN, 9,303 are listed companies and the rest are not. That is the ratio worth carrying around: for every listed company whose numbers you can read in the press, there are roughly 335 whose accounts exist only as a filing somebody has to go and fetch.

By state, the register concentrates hard:

State	Entities
Maharashtra	755,653
Delhi	507,637
West Bengal	291,627
Uttar Pradesh	278,016
Karnataka	258,322
Tamil Nadu	251,291

Maharashtra and Delhi together hold about a third of everything.

Counts alone flatten the difference between them. The analysis of how long an Indian company actually lasts splits the same register by state and year of incorporation, which is where the states stop looking alike: the share struck off runs from 42.6% to 16.6%.

How this was counted

Nothing here needs a tool you do not have. The file is public, and the counts are counts.

• Source: the MCA company master, as the ministry publishes it.
• Snapshot: downloaded 2026-09-08; the resource’s own last-updated date is 2026-07-22; 3,674,314 rows. That exact count is kept here, and nowhere else on the page, because it is how you confirm you are holding the same file we were.
• Fields used: entity_id, status, registration_date, state.
• Status table: a value count over status, unmodified. Values are printed exactly as the file spells them, including the duplicates.
• Companies versus LLPs: entities whose identifier is 21 characters are counted as companies; the rest carry LLP-style identifiers.
• Listed versus unlisted: the first character of the CIN, L or U.
• Cohort table: the first four characters of registration_date, counted against the four strike-off statuses.
• Known dirt: three rows carry registration years that cannot be real (1111, 5600, 9076). They are left in the totals and excluded from nothing, because three rows in 3.7 million change no figure on this page.

MCA’s own Monthly Information Bulletin is the fuller official series if you want to cross-check the totals against a government publication rather than a government dataset.

What to do with it

The aggregate is interesting. It is also not your problem.

If you are dealing with one company, the only number that matters is whether that company is in the 70.7% or the 25.6%, and that check is free, takes about thirty seconds, and needs no account. Do it before you sign, not after, and if you have never done it, the two-minute check on whether a company is real walks through it.

And when the status comes back Active, remember what you have just learnt: it means the entity has not been removed. It does not mean anyone is home. For that you need the filings themselves, and specifically whether the company has been filing them at all.

Written by the Entiva team, from a snapshot of the register we keep because answering questions about Indian companies requires knowing what is in it.