How many companies and LLPs are registered in India?

Our MCA snapshot contains 3,123,764 companies and 550,550 limited liability partnerships (LLPs). Together they make 3,674,314 registered entity rows. Of these, 2,597,823 carry Active status (70.70%) and 939,392 carry Strike Off status (25.57%). The company-only Active count is 2,100,421.

These are status counts in a file last updated by its publisher on 22 July 2026, downloaded on 8 September. Registered and Active do not mean operating; the file is not a count of today’s live businesses. It also omits almost all of Chhattisgarh, a gap explained below.

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 31 lakh carry a 21-character CIN, which is a company. About 5.5 lakh 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 more than five lakh LLPs.

And it is missing most of 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, 79.85% 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 appears on 2,595 rows, around seven in every ten thousand. This is a formal status, separate from Active and Strike Off. Its small count here does not explain why other entities stopped operating or filing.

Under CIRP appears on 1,944 rows. That is the number carrying this status in this snapshot, not an independently verified count of all ongoing corporate insolvency resolution processes.

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. Under section 248 of the Companies Act 2013, grounds include failure to commence business within one year and two preceding financial years without business or operations where the company has not sought dormant status. Failure to file is not itself the ground in that provision. The snapshot does not tell us which ground applied to each company.

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 measure a closure rate. These are statuses at one point in time, with no date of strike off for each entity.

What registration-year groups show

Split the snapshot by registration year and count the share currently carrying one of four strike-off-related statuses. The count includes entities still under process, so it is not a completed-removal rate.

Registered in	Entities	Strike-off-related status, including pending
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 entities registered in 2012 carry one of those four statuses in this snapshot. The same is true of the 2000 group. These percentages mix companies and LLPs and do not track how or when each entity stopped trading.

Recent groups have had less time to acquire a strike-off status. The snapshot does not identify why the Registrar struck off any particular entity, or when. Read the recent rows as shorter observation periods, not evidence that those entities are healthier.

Older groups have had longer for their status to change. These rows cannot estimate an individual company’s lifetime or future chance of strike off.

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. That is not the year to date: the newest registration anywhere in the file is 2 June 2026, so it is five months of registrations, not the eight the download date might suggest. The snapshot contains no strike-off dates, so these registration counts cannot be compared with a removal rate.

Where they are, and what they are

Of the roughly 31 lakh entities with a full CIN, 9,303 carry a listed company identifier. The other identifiers start with U. That is roughly 335 unlisted company identifiers per listed one in this snapshot.

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. An analysis of strike-off status by state and registration year splits the same register by both fields. Those cross-sections describe recorded status, not a measured lifespan.

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 resource, 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. The dated denominator matters when comparing these figures with a later register.
• 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.
• Registration-year table: the first four characters of registration_date, counted against the four strike-off-related statuses, including pending removal.
• Known dirt: 3,129 rows carry registration years that cannot be real: 1111 on 3,127 of them, plus one 5600 and one 9076. Three more carry no registration date at all. They remain in the overall status and entity totals, but none belongs to a displayed registration-year group. The table therefore cannot describe their registration-year status mix.

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, check that company’s status. The 70.7% and 25.6% figures above include LLPs and come from an older, incomplete snapshot. The lookup is free and needs no account. Do it before you sign, 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.