---
title: "How to download a company's documents from the MCA portal, and what it actually costs you"
description: "The MCA charges ₹100 to see a company's filings. Here is the full route through View Public Documents, the four limits nobody warns you about, and when it is worth it."
author: "Pradeep Vanga"
published: 2026-09-11
updated: 2026-09-11
category: "Guide"
tags: ["mca-portal", "view-public-documents", "due-diligence", "filings"]
canonical: https://entiva.in/blog/how-to-download-mca-documents/
publisher: "Entiva"
---

# How to download a company's documents from the MCA portal, and what it actually costs you

You need a company's balance sheet. Or its list of shareholders, or the charge
that a bank registered over its assets three years ago. You have found the MCA
portal, you have found the page that says View Public Documents, and somewhere
between there and the file on your desk the whole thing has become considerably
more annoying than it looked.

This is the honest version of that route. What is free, what the ₹100 buys,
and the four constraints the tutorials tend to leave out because they finish
writing at the payment screen.

## First, the part that costs nothing

Before you pay for anything, a surprising amount of it is free.

One caveat on the mechanics, because MCA moves things: parts of the V3 portal
that were once open have been going behind a sign-in. An MCA user account is
free to create either way, so what follows is free in the sense that matters,
even if you are asked to log in for some of it.

Go to mca.gov.in, and under MCA Services look for Master Data. A search by
company name or [CIN](https://entiva.in/blog/how-to-read-a-cin-number/) returns the company's
current status, its date of incorporation, its registered office state, its
authorised and paid-up capital, its directors, and, under a separate menu item,
its **index of charges**: the list of loans secured against its assets.

That is a lot. For most questions it is enough. If you are checking whether a
company exists, whether it is still alive, and how old it is, you have your
answer in about three minutes and you have spent nothing. The
[two-minute reality check](https://entiva.in/blog/how-to-check-if-a-company-is-real/) runs
entirely on this free layer.

What master data will not give you is anything the company actually **filed**.
No accounts. No annual return. No shareholder list. No charge documents, only
the fact that charges exist. For those you pay.

## The paid route, step by step

The service is called View Public Documents, and on the V3 portal it lives at
**MCA Services → Document Related Services → View Public Documents V3**. You
need a registered MCA user account, which is free to create, and you need to be
logged in.

From there the flow is:

1. **Search for the company** by name or CIN and select it from the results.
2. **Pick one document category** and, optionally, filter by year. There are
   eight categories and you can only choose one at a time. Hold that thought.
3. **Add the company to your cart.** Note the wording: you add the *company*,
   not the documents. This is the point at which the fee attaches.
4. **Pay.** MCA hands you off to BharatKosh, the Government of India's Non-Tax
   Receipt Portal, which is where the money is actually collected. You come back
   with an SRN, the service request number that is your receipt for the purchase.
5. **Go to My Workspace → Documents,** find the company, and download.

The fee is **₹100 per company**. That is the part most people get wrong in a
useful direction: it is not per document. One payment covers every form the
registry holds for that company, across every category and every year. If the
company has filed for fifteen years, ₹100 buys the lot.

## The four constraints nobody mentions

Here is where the route stops being a tutorial and starts being a logistics
problem. MCA states the rules on its own download page, and they are worth
reading in full because each one changes how you have to plan the exercise:

> - A maximum of 5 documents per Company/ LLP can be downloaded at a time for
>   every successful transaction.
> - Post successful payment, Company/ LLP documents will be available for
>   download in 'My Workspace' for 7 days.
> - Once a user initiates download of any document for a particular Company/
>   LLP, a time limit of a maximum of 3 hours will get enabled.
> - All downloaded documents having .OCT extension need to be extracted using a
>   file compression application (such as 7-zip) and then opened using Adobe
>   Acrobat.

Four sentences, four separate ways to lose an afternoon.

**Five documents at a time.** Not five per session, five per selection. A
company with twenty filings in one category is four rounds of tick, download,
wait, tick again.

**Seven days to view.** Generous, and not the clock that bites.

**Three hours once you start.** This is the binding one, and it starts the
moment you download your *first* document for that company. Not when you paid.
Not when you logged in. If you open one file at 10am to check you have the right
company and then go to a meeting, you have until 1pm to get everything else, and
the seven-day window does not save you.

The practical consequence: **work out the full list of what you want before you
download anything at all.** Browse the categories, note what is there, and only
then start pulling.

**And they arrive as .OCT files.** Not PDFs. `.OCT` is an archive, and MCA's
own instruction is to extract it with something like 7-Zip and then open what is
inside with Adobe Acrobat. If you have ever downloaded an MCA document, double
clicked it, and had your machine ask what application to use, that is why. It is
not corrupted.

## The eight categories, and why they matter

The category picker is the step that decides how long the whole job takes,
because you can select **one at a time**. To see everything a company has ever
filed, you make eight passes through the same flow.

| # | Category | What is in it |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | Incorporation Documents | The MoA, the AoA, and the forms that created the company |
| 2 | Annual Returns and Balance Sheet eForms | AOC-4 and MGT-7, with the audited accounts attached |
| 3 | Change in Directors/Designated Partner | Every appointment, resignation and change, dated |
| 4 | Charge Documents | Charges created, modified and satisfied over the company's assets |
| 5 | Certificates | Certificates the registrar issued against the company's filings |
| 6 | LLP Forms (Conversion of company to LLP) | Only where a company converted into an LLP |
| 7 | Other eForm Documents | Capital changes, office shifts, resolutions, the long tail |
| 8 | Other | Attachments the registry does not slot anywhere else |

Most questions live in two of these. If you want to know what the company
earns, you want category 2, and the accounts are attachments *inside* the AOC-4
rather than separate rows, which is why
[finding a private company's revenue](https://entiva.in/blog/how-to-find-a-private-company-revenue-india/)
is more fiddly than it sounds. If you want to know who has a claim on its
assets, you want category 4.

## What a real document list looks like

Descriptions of this route always stop before the interesting part, so here is
an actual manifest. A small private company, category 2, all years:

| Date filed | Form | What it is | Pages |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 28/01/2025 | MGT-7A | Form MGT-7A | 13 |
| 28/01/2025 | MGT-7A | List of Directors | 1 |
| 28/01/2025 | MGT-7A | List of share holders, debenture holders | 1 |
| 28/01/2026 | AOC-4 | Copy of Financial Statements (incl. Board's/auditor's report) | 26 |
| 28/01/2026 | AOC-4 | Form AOC-4 | 23 |
| 28/01/2026 | MGT-7A | Form MGT-7A | 15 |
| 28/01/2026 | MGT-7A | List of share holders, debenture holders | 1 |
| 28/01/2026 | MGT-7A | Photograph of registered office | 1 |
| 28/01/2026 | EDIRECTOR | e-Director's Report | 11 |

Nine documents, one category, one company. At five per selection that is two
rounds. And notice what the manifest quietly tells you before you have opened a
single file: both years were filed on the same day in January, the shareholder
list is one page, and somebody photographed the registered office because the
form asked them to.

Notice also what is *not* there. This company has filed nothing under charges,
which means no lender has registered a claim over its assets. An empty category
is a finding.

## What this route will not do for you

**It will not tell you the company is honest.** The register holds what was
filed. It does not audit it, and it does not know what happened last week.
Filings run months behind the events they describe.

**It will not fill in a year the company never filed.** If the accounts for
2024 are missing, they are missing because nobody sent them, and no amount of
paying ₹100 conjures them up. That absence is itself information, and often the
most useful information on the page.

**It is not a certified copy.** What you download is the document as filed,
without attestation. If you need something a court or a bank will accept as
authenticated, MCA runs a separate Get Certified Copies service, it costs more,
and the copy comes from the jurisdictional registrar rather than instantly from
your workspace. Do not use one where the other is required.

**And it is per company.** Checking five suppliers is five searches, five
payments, five three-hour windows, five sets of .OCT files.

## What to do with all this

1. **Do the free checks first.** Status, incorporation date, and the index of
   charges cost nothing and answer most questions. Pay only when they do not.
2. **Confirm the entity by CIN before you pay.** Near-identical names across
   states are common, and ₹100 spent on the wrong company is ₹100 gone.
3. **Decide what you need before you click download.** The three-hour clock
   starts on the first file, not the first page.
4. **Budget eight passes** if you genuinely want everything, and expect a
   captcha on each one.
5. **Keep the originals.** Extract the .OCT, keep the PDFs, and note the date
   you retrieved them. A filing you can produce later is worth more than a
   summary you cannot source.
6. **If the answer has to be defensible,** consider whether you need the
   certified route instead.

## Why use Entiva instead of MCA directly?

MCA is the official source, and the documents are the same public filings.
Entiva changes the work around them. It runs all eight category searches,
unpacks the downloaded archives, checks every file and organises the result as
one set. During MCA's seven-day access window, it can check again and add only
the newer filings, without repeating the original download by hand.

You can also put a company on alert. Entiva checks MCA once a day and tells you
in the app and by email when a new filing appears. The alert is free; reading
the new documents still requires an order and MCA's registry fee.

If you only need a company's name, status, incorporation date or state, there
is no reason to buy its filings. Use MCA directly or Entiva's free lookup. If
you need the complete document set, expect to repeat the check later, or watch
several companies, Entiva removes the repetitive work while keeping MCA as the
source.

What that [costs and what a fee covers](https://entiva.in/pricing/) is on the pricing page,
registry fee included.

Either way, the documents are public and the register is open. The only real
question is whose afternoon it is.

*Written by the Entiva team, who retrieve MCA filings for a living and have
lost more than one afternoon to the three-hour clock.*

## Frequently asked

### Why use Entiva instead of downloading documents directly from MCA?

MCA gives you the official public filings. Entiva retrieves those same filings across all eight document categories, unpacks and checks them, and organises them in one set. During MCA's seven-day access window, Entiva can check again and add only the newer filings. It can also alert you when MCA publishes something new. If you only need free company master data, using MCA directly or Entiva's free lookup may be enough.

### How much does it cost to download a company's documents from MCA?

₹100 per company for View Public Documents access on the MCA V3 portal. It is one fee covering every form the registry holds for that company, not a per-document charge.

### Why are my downloaded MCA documents .OCT files instead of PDFs?

MCA delivers View Public Documents downloads as .OCT archives. MCA's own instruction is to extract them with a file compression tool such as 7-Zip and then open the PDFs inside with Adobe Acrobat.

### How long do I have to download MCA documents after paying?

Seven days to view from the date of purchase, and a maximum of three hours from the moment you start downloading the first document for that company. The three-hour clock is the one that catches people out.

### Do I need an MCA account to download company documents?

Yes for the paid documents. Master data such as status, incorporation date, directors and the index of charges carries no fee, though MCA has been moving parts of the V3 portal behind a sign-in, and a user account is free to create. Anything the company actually filed sits behind that account and the ₹100 fee.

## Related reading

- [How to find out what a private Indian company earns](https://entiva.in/blog/how-to-find-a-private-company-revenue-india/): Private Indian companies don't publish their accounts, but they do file them. Here's where the revenue figure actually sits, and how far to trust it.
- [How to read a CIN: what those 21 characters tell you](https://entiva.in/blog/how-to-read-a-cin-number/): A Corporate Identity Number isn't a random string. Each block of it tells you something real about a company, before you open a single filing.
- [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/): A quarter of the entities on India's companies register no longer legally exist. Here is how to check the one in front of you, free, in about two minutes.

_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._