Every company status on the MCA register, and what each one actually means

Most people think a company has about five possible states. Active, dormant, struck off, in liquidation, and gone.

The register uses twenty-three strings in the status field. Some cite the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code rather than the Companies Act. One is the word “Vanished”. One is not a status at all, and it is the single most misread thing on this page.

How many entities carry each value, including the spelling variants, is counted in how many companies in India actually still exist. This page is the meanings: the law behind each string, and the ACTIVE-compliance tag people keep mixing up with status.

The file covers companies and LLPs together. “Converted and Dissolved” and “Converted to CMP and Dissolved” appear only against LLPs. “Dormant under section 455” appears only against companies.

Alive: Active

Active means the registrar has not removed the company. That is the whole of it. Not that it trades, employs anyone, has money, or has filed anything this decade.

What to do when you see it on a company you are about to pay or sign with is in what a company’s status actually means for you. The rest of this page is the rarer values, and the lookalike that is not a status.

The tag that is not a status: ACTIVE compliance

Here is the one that generates the most confused searching, because two different things share a word.

Alongside Company Status, MCA’s master data carries a separate field about ACTIVE compliance, and a company can be flagged “Active-non-compliant” there while its actual status is Active. People find that flag, search “company status active non compliant”, and get answers that conflate the two.

It comes from rule 25A of the Companies (Incorporation) Rules 2014, inserted by the Companies (Incorporation) Amendment Rules 2019 dated 21 February 2019 and effective from 25 February 2019. Every company incorporated on or before 31 December 2017 had to file e-Form ACTIVE, formally INC-22A, giving particulars of the company and its registered office. The deadline landed at 15 June 2019 after an extension by the Fourth Amendment Rules of 25 April 2019, and the rule then says:

Provided also that in case a company does not intimate the said particulars, the Company shall be marked as “Active-non-compliant” on or after 16th June, 2019 and shall be liable for action under sub-section (9) of section 12 of the Act

Two consequences, and the second is the one nobody gets right.

It blocks five event filings. While a company is marked non-compliant the registrar will not accept SH-7 (change in authorised capital), PAS-3 (change in paid-up capital), DIR-12 (most director changes), INC-22 (change of registered office) or INC-28 (amalgamation or de-merger).

It does not block annual filings or charge filings. MCA’s own FAQ on the form answers the question “whether a company which is ACTIVE non-compliant can file the annual filing and charge related forms” with a single word: yes. So a non-compliant company can still be filing its accounts perfectly well, and a compliant one can have filed nothing for years. The flag and the filing history are independent signals and you should read both.

Filing the form later restores standing, under sub-rule (2), on payment of a fee of ten thousand rupees.

One honest note on presentation. MCA renders the tag “Active-non-compliant” in the rule itself and “ACTIVE Non-compliant” in its own FAQ. There is no single canonical casing, even inside MCA.

On the way out: three stages, not one

Strike off is a process with visible stages, and the register names each.

Under process of striking off (27,194). The registrar has begun. Section 248(1) sets out the grounds, and they are worth knowing because they tell you what the company is being accused of:

(a) a company has failed to commence its business within one year of its incorporation; or … (c) a company is not carrying on any business or operation for a period of two immediately preceding financial years and has not made any application within such period for obtaining the status of a dormant company under section 455; or (d) the subscribers to the memorandum have not paid the subscription which they had undertaken to pay … or (e) the company is not carrying on any business or operations, as revealed after the physical verification carried out under sub-section (9) of section 12.

The company and its directors then get thirty days to make representations.

Strike Off-AwaitingPublication (83). A small number, and it marks a genuinely important gap. Under section 248(5) the registrar strikes the name off and publishes notice in the Official Gazette, and it is on publication that the company stands dissolved. This status is the space between the decision and the publication.

Strike Off (939,392). Gone. A quarter of the entire register, and the ordinary way an Indian company ends.

Two things people get wrong about it.

The directors are not off the hook. Section 248(7):

The liability, if any, of every director, manager or other officer who was exercising any power of management, and of every member of the company dissolved under sub-section (5), shall continue and may be enforced as if the company had not been dissolved.

And the assets remain available. Section 250 cancels the certificate of incorporation “except for the purpose of realising the amount due to the company and for the payment or discharge of the liabilities or obligations of the company”.

So a struck-off debtor is a serious problem and not automatically a dead end.

Coming back. Section 252 provides two routes with two very different clocks. Under section 252(1), a person aggrieved by the registrar’s order may appeal to the Tribunal within three years. Under section 252(3), the company, a member, a creditor or a workman may apply before the expiry of twenty years from the Gazette publication. Where restoration is ordered, the registrar issues a fresh certificate of incorporation.

Insolvency: four statuses, and two of them cite the wrong Act on purpose

Under CIRP (1,944). A corporate insolvency resolution process has begun under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code 2016. Two provisions change everything about dealing with the company. Section 14(1) declares a moratorium prohibiting

the institution of suits or continuation of pending suits or proceedings against the corporate debtor including execution of any judgement, decree or order …

along with any action to enforce security and any recovery of property by an owner or lessor. And section 17 provides that on the interim resolution professional’s appointment “the powers of the board of directors … shall stand suspended and be exercised by the interim resolution professional”.

Whoever you were dealing with no longer has authority. There is somebody else to talk to, and the register’s master data carries their details.

Under Liquidation (8,515). A liquidator controls the assets.

Dissolved (Liquidated) (11,970). Finished.

Dissolved under section 54 (507) and Dissolved under section 59(8) (983). These look like Companies Act references and they are not. Both are sections of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, and the Code itself explains why they reach the register. Section 54 covers dissolution once a liquidation is complete, and section 54(3) requires a copy of the order to be forwarded to the authority the corporate debtor is registered with within seven days. Section 59 covers voluntary liquidation, and section 59(9) requires the same within fourteen days.

So the distinction is real and useful: section 54 is dissolution after a compulsory liquidation, section 59(8) is dissolution after a voluntary one. One company was wound up because it had to be, the other because its members decided to.

Reorganised out of existence

Amalgamated (40,195). The company merged into another and was, in the statute’s phrase, dissolved without winding up. Section 232(3)(d) empowers the Tribunal to provide for exactly that, and section 232(4) vests the property and liabilities in the transferee. Everything you were dealing with, including any litigation and any debt owed to you, has moved to a different company. Your job is to find out which.

Converted to LLP (29,512). The company became a limited liability partnership. Different Act, different filings, and the register shows less about an LLP than it does about a company.

Converted and Dissolved (1,953) and Converted to CMP and Dissolved (981). LLP-side conversions, the second being an LLP that became a company.

Deliberately asleep: Dormant under section 455

Only 2,595 entities, which is seven in every ten thousand. Dormancy is a formal, deliberate choice and almost nobody makes it. Companies that stop trading overwhelmingly just stop filing and wait to be struck off.

Section 455 lets a company formed for a future project, or to hold an asset or intellectual property, apply for dormant status, and it defines the alternative route in:

“inactive company” means a company which has not been carrying on any business or operation, or has not made any significant accounting transaction during the last two financial years, or has not filed financial statements and annual returns during the last two financial years

The application is Form MSC-1, and it needs a special resolution or the consent of three-quarters of shareholders by value. A dormant company then files a return of dormant company annually in Form MSC-3.

One widely repeated error worth correcting. Section 455(4) says that where a company has not filed financial statements or annual returns for two consecutive financial years, the registrar issues a notice and enters its name in the register maintained for dormant companies. That is not a strike off. And section 455(6) says the registrar shall strike a dormant company’s name off the register of dormant companies where it fails to comply with the section, which means it loses dormant status rather than ceasing to exist. Removal from the main register is a different provision, section 248(1)(c).

Two registers, two consequences, routinely conflated.

The leftovers

Inactive for e-filing (10,261). Larger than Under Liquidation, and rarely discussed. Inactive (202). Not available for efiling (13). These flag that the entity cannot transact on the portal, and they are not statements about the company’s legal existence in the way the strike-off family is. If you meet one on a company that matters to you, treat it as a reason to look at the filing history rather than as an answer in itself.

Unclassified (1). Vanished (1). MCA separately publishes a list of vanishing companies, historically those that disappeared after raising money from the public. Exactly one entity in 3.7 million carries the word in this field, and we are not going to name it.

What no status tells you

Whether the company is solvent. Active is not a credit opinion.

Whether it is trading. No status field means “operating”.

Whether the record is current. The register holds what was filed and processed. A company that collapsed last month still says Active. For anything beyond the status field you need the filings themselves, and what a retrieval covers sets out which of the eight categories holds what.

Or whether you are looking at the right company. Near-identical names across states are the commonest error in this whole exercise. Confirm by CIN before you conclude anything, which is the first move in the two-minute check on whether a company is real.

The one-line version

Meanings only. What to do when the word is on a company you are about to pay or sign with is in what a company’s status actually means for you.

If you see	What it is
Active	The registrar has not removed it. Not a health check
Active, flagged ACTIVE non-compliant	A separate compliance tag. Annual filings and charges are unaffected
Under process of striking off	The registrar has begun a section 248 removal
Strike Off, Strike Off-AwaitingPublication	Dissolved, or about to be, on Gazette publication. Directors and assets still reachable
Under CIRP	Insolvency has begun. Board powers sit with the insolvency professional. A moratorium applies
Under Liquidation	A liquidator controls the assets
Dissolved, in any form	It has ended. How and when changes the remedy
Amalgamated	Merged into another company. The transferee now holds the property and the liabilities
Converted to LLP	Same people, different Act, thinner disclosure
Dormant under section 455	Deliberately not trading. Rare enough to be a considered decision
Inactive for e-filing, Inactive	Cannot transact on the portal. Not, by itself, a statement about legal existence

Where these numbers come from

• Source: the MCA company master, as the ministry publishes it.
• Snapshot: taken 2026-09-08, stated at source as last updated 2026-07-22, 3,674,314 rows, which matches the source’s own reported total.
• What that check does and does not prove. The row-count match means the copy agrees with the total published alongside it. That is worth less than it sounds: a copy of this register can match its own stated total and still be missing an entire state, which is a thing we have since found. It is not a per-value confirmation either, so each string below is counted from the file rather than re-queried one value at a time.
• Method: a value count over the status column, unmodified. Strings are printed exactly as the file spells them, duplicates and casing variants included. The table of those counts, the cohort rates, and the listed versus unlisted split live on how many companies in India actually still exist, not here.

Statuses are free to check and they are the cheapest thing you will ever do before signing something. They are also one word standing in for a legal position that occasionally runs to several sections of two different Acts. Both of those things are true at once, which is why this page exists.

Written by the Entiva team, from the register we keep and the statutes behind it. Not legal advice.