Open Company Data in Spain: Official Sources, APIs and Reuse Rights

Spain has one of the richest public-data ecosystems in Europe for company research, but it is fragmented. There is not one single official bulk file that gives you every Spanish company, every address, every officer, every account, every public contract and every business signal in a clean table.

Instead, Spain’s company data landscape is built from several official sources: the BORME, the BOE open-data API, the national open-data catalogue, registry statistics, public procurement data, grants and subsidies, intellectual-property registers, regulatory registers, sanctions and sector-specific datasets.

This guide explains what is available, what each source is good for, and what you need to check before reusing Spanish company data commercially.

Quick Answer

The best starting point for Spanish company open data is the BORME, the official commercial registry bulletin published by the Spanish State Gazette agency. It records corporate events such as incorporations, director appointments, resignations, capital increases, mergers, dissolutions and insolvency notices.

For a broader company profile, BORME data should be combined with other official sources:

• BOE and BORME open-data API
• datos.gob.es national open-data catalogue
• Colegio de Registradores open statistical datasets
• INE DIRCE business statistics
• PLACSP public procurement datasets
• BDNS public grants and subsidies
• OEPM patents, trademarks and trade names
• CNMV listed-company and financial-market records
• Banco de Espana and DGSFP regulated-entity registers
• CNMC competition and regulated-market data
• GLEIF Legal Entity Identifier data
• EU and international sanctions lists
• regional and local open-data portals

The key limitation is that public does not always mean bulk-downloadable, marketing-ready or free of privacy obligations.

What Counts as Company Data in Spain?

Spanish company data is not a single category. It includes several different layers:

For practical business use, the strongest datasets are often the combinations: BORME plus procurement, BORME plus grants, BORME plus LEI, or BORME plus trademarks.

Legal Framework for Reuse

Spain’s public-sector data reuse framework is based mainly on Law 37/2007 on the reuse of public-sector information, developed for the state sector by Royal Decree 1495/2011. The framework allows public-sector information to be reused for commercial or non-commercial purposes, subject to the conditions attached to each dataset.

Common reuse duties include:

• cite the source
• do not distort the meaning of the information
• mention the last update date where available
• do not imply that a public body endorses your product
• respect personal-data rules under GDPR and Spanish data-protection law
• respect dataset-specific licences and restrictions

The EU high-value dataset framework is also relevant. Regulation (EU) 2023/138 includes "companies and company ownership" as a high-value dataset category and lists core company attributes such as company name, status, registration date, registered office, legal form, registration number, Member State and activity code. In practice, implementation still varies by country and by source.

Main Official Sources

1. BOE / BORME

The Boletin Oficial del Registro Mercantil, usually called BORME, is the official daily publication for many corporate acts recorded by Spain’s commercial registries. It is published through the Agencia Estatal Boletin Oficial del Estado.

What it provides:

• new company incorporations
• director and officer appointments
• resignations and removals
• capital increases and reductions
• mergers and spin-offs
• changes of company name, registered office or corporate purpose
• dissolutions, liquidations and insolvency-related notices
• legal announcements and notices

Access:

• BOE/BORME web pages
• BOE open-data API
• PDF/XML publication trail depending on the document

Reuse:

• BOE allows commercial and non-commercial reuse under its legal notice.
• Derived products should cite BOE/BORME and avoid suggesting that the derived database is official.
• If personal data is involved, GDPR and Spanish data-protection rules still apply.

Best use:

• corporate event timelines
• legal traceability
• historical changes
• B2B entity matching
• source-backed company profiles

Limit:

• BORME is an event-publication source, not a ready-made clean company master database. It must be parsed, normalized and deduplicated.

2. datos.gob.es

datos.gob.es is Spain’s national open-data catalogue. It indexes datasets from national, regional and local public bodies.

For company-data research, it is useful because it points to official datasets such as BORME, BDNS and many sector-specific resources.

Best use:

• finding official datasets
• checking licence metadata
• discovering regional sources
• documenting source provenance

Limit:

• the catalogue points to sources; it does not make every dataset clean or standardized.

3. Colegio de Registradores OpenData and Statistics

The Colegio de Registradores publishes open statistical datasets and reports related to Spain’s registries. The mercantile statistics layer includes aggregated information about incorporations, capital changes, company extinctions, account deposits and other registry activity.

Best use:

• business-demography trends
• provincial and regional company activity
• macro analysis of the Spanish corporate landscape
• benchmarking by geography and time

Limit:

• most of this layer is aggregated statistics, not individual company records.

4. INE DIRCE

The Directorio Central de Empresas, or DIRCE, is Spain’s central statistical business register maintained by the Instituto Nacional de Estadistica.

It provides aggregated statistics on active enterprises and local units, usually broken down by geography, legal form, activity and employee-size stratum.

Best use:

• market sizing
• business-population totals
• regional and sector analysis
• comparing official business counts against derived datasets

Limit:

• DIRCE statistical exploitation does not provide individual company microdata for this operation.

5. PLACSP Public Procurement Data

The Plataforma de Contratacion del Sector Publico publishes open datasets about public tenders and contracting activity. The Ministry of Finance describes these datasets as public information available for reuse.

Best use:

• identifying companies that sell to the public sector
• contract-award history
• public buyer-supplier relationships
• sector demand analysis

Limit:

• procurement data only covers public-sector contracting activity. It is not a complete register of Spanish companies.

6. BDNS Grants and Subsidies

The Base de Datos Nacional de Subvenciones publishes information about public grants and aid, including calls, concessions, beneficiaries, amounts and purposes. It offers HTML, CSV, XLSX, PDF and JSON/API access paths.

Best use:

• grant-recipient profiles
• public-funding signals
• R&D and growth indicators
• regional subsidy analysis

Limit:

• the dataset includes safeguards around individuals and correction rights. Reusers should check the BDNS legal notice and avoid using personal data outside a lawful purpose.

7. OEPM OpenData

The Oficina Espanola de Patentes y Marcas provides open data for patents, utility models, industrial designs, trademarks, trade names and related publications.

Best use:

• brand ownership
• patent and innovation signals
• trade-name matching
• company IP portfolios

Limit:

• reusing metadata does not grant any industrial-property rights. The legal status of each trademark, patent or design must be interpreted carefully.

8. CNMV

The Comision Nacional del Mercado de Valores publishes public registers and information about listed companies, issuers, financial instruments and supervised entities.

Best use:

• listed-company validation
• securities-market filings
• issuer research
• regulated financial-market entities

Limit:

• CNMV data is sector-specific. It does not cover ordinary private companies unless they appear in securities-market contexts.

9. Banco de Espana and DGSFP

The Banco de Espana and the Direccion General de Seguros y Fondos de Pensiones publish public information about entities operating in regulated financial and insurance sectors.

Best use:

• regulated-entity verification
• sector-specific compliance checks
• financial and insurance market research

Limit:

• these are sector registers, not general company directories.

10. CNMC Data

CNMC Data provides datasets and APIs from Spain’s competition and regulated-markets authority. Its reuse conditions are based on Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 unless a dataset-specific condition applies.

Best use:

• competition and market regulation
• sanctioned or regulated entities
• energy, telecoms, audiovisual, transport and other regulated-sector analysis

Limit:

• the share-alike licence may affect downstream redistribution of derived datasets.

11. GLEIF Legal Entity Identifier Data

GLEIF provides Legal Entity Identifier records and relationship data for entities that hold an LEI. This can help connect Spanish companies to global corporate structures.

Best use:

• entity resolution
• parent-subsidiary relationships
• financial and compliance workflows
• cross-border company matching

Limit:

• not every Spanish company has an LEI. Coverage is stronger among financial institutions, listed companies and larger companies.

12. Sanctions and Compliance Lists

For Spanish company screening, BORME-based profiles can be cross-checked against sanctions and regulatory lists such as:

• EU consolidated sanctions
• United Nations sanctions
• OFAC
• UK OFSI
• World Bank debarred suppliers
• ESMA and national-market authority sanctions
• AEPD data-protection resolutions
• CNMC competition decisions

Best use:

• KYB
• risk screening
• supplier due diligence
• compliance monitoring

Limit:

• matching must be conservative. A name match is not always the same as a verified legal-entity match.

13. Regional and Sector-Specific Sources

Spain also has many regional and sector datasets that can enrich company research:

• regional public procurement portals
• local business activity licences
• tourism and hospitality registers
• food-sector registers such as RGSEAA
• public-sector entity inventories such as INVENTE
• equality-plan registers such as REGCON
• agricultural payment datasets such as FEGA
• foreign investment data such as DataInvex
• R&D and innovation datasets such as CDTI and CORDIS
• tax debtor lists published under specific legal conditions

Best use:

• specialist enrichment
• local-market analysis
• sector-by-sector coverage
• signals that do not appear in BORME

Limit:

• formats, licences, update schedules and identifiers vary widely.

A Practical Source Map for Spain

Open-data aggregators such as OpenMercantil show how wide the Spanish source map can become. Their public sources page describes BORME as the primary backbone and then adds procurement, grants, LEI, sanctions, intellectual property, sector registers, public aid, data-protection resolutions, competition decisions, food-sector registrations, public-sector inventories and more.

That is the right mental model for Spain: not one database, but a source graph.

For a production-grade Spain company dataset, the real work is:

• collecting official sources
• preserving provenance
• parsing semi-structured publications
• matching entities by CIF/NIF, name, address and event history
• removing duplicates
• normalizing CNAE/NACE activity codes
• separating company data from personal data
• keeping source links for every claim
• explaining licence and reuse conditions per source

Practical Options: Open API, Contact Data and Private Reports

For a user who wants to move from research to action, Spain has three practical layers:

• For open company research and API access, OpenMercantil is the strongest public open-data layer we have found for Spain. It structures BORME information, keeps traceability back to official publications, exposes a free REST API, offers downloadable datasets and adds a broad source graph around procurement, grants, LEI, intellectual property, sanctions and regulator data.
• For commercial prospecting files with company contact fields, Central de Comunicacion is positioned around Spanish company lists with business emails, phones and segmentation. This belongs to the contact-data and marketing-data layer, so users should separately review lawful basis, source freshness, opt-out handling, Robinson List exposure, privacy rules and electronic-communications compliance before using any file for outreach.
• For paid company reports, eInforma is a private option for legal, financial, risk, payment and registry-related reports. Treat it as a reporting and credit-risk product, not as an open-data source and not as a substitute for a contact-data file.

OpenMercantil strengthens the open-data/API layer. Central de Comunicacion covers the practical contact-data purchasing use case. Neither replaces official sources; both sit above them as usability, enrichment or commercial-access layers that still need provenance and compliance checks.

Can You Reuse Spanish Company Data Commercially?

Often yes, but not always in the same way.

Use this simple rule:

Public corporate data can support research, compliance and business analysis. It does not automatically authorize direct marketing, profiling or enrichment with personal contact details. Emails, phone numbers and contact roles require a separate data-quality and legal-basis review.

What Is Missing from Official Open Data?

Spain’s public sources are rich, but they do not provide a fully finished commercial company database.

Common gaps include:

• one unified bulk file of all active and inactive companies
• clean normalized company names
• stable entity identifiers across all datasets
• resolved changes of company name and registered office
• officer histories deduplicated across spelling variants
• complete accounts and financials in open bulk form
• verified phone numbers and emails
• sector-specific enrichment in one schema
• permission and compliance metadata for marketing use

This is where a data provider adds value: not by pretending the public sources are already perfect, but by cleaning, matching, validating and documenting them.

How CompaniesData Can Help

CompaniesData can package public and commercial business data into practical country-level datasets for sales, research and market analysis.

For Spain, that means helping users move from scattered sources to usable records:

• company identity fields
• activity and sector classification
• province and region segmentation
• public-source references
• enrichment from procurement, grants, IP and regulatory sources where available
• demo samples before purchase
• clear notes about source provenance and reuse limits

If you need a Spain company dataset for sales, research or market sizing, request a sample file first. A sample lets you check field structure, coverage and quality before you commit to a full dataset.

FAQ

Is BORME open data?

BORME is the official Spanish commercial registry bulletin published through the BOE. BOE provides open-data access and reuse conditions. Reuse is possible, including commercial reuse, provided the reuser follows the applicable conditions, cites the source, does not distort the information and does not imply official endorsement.

Is there a free official bulk download of all Spanish companies?

Spain has many official open datasets, but a single clean official bulk download of all Spanish companies with full company details is not generally available as a ready-to-use file. BORME is the strongest public backbone, but it is an event-publication source that requires parsing and normalization.

Does DIRCE provide individual company records?

No. DIRCE is extremely useful for official business statistics, but the public statistical exploitation provides aggregated data, not individual company microdata.

Can I use Spanish public company data for marketing?

Not automatically. Public company information and marketing contact data are different categories. Public registry data may support business analysis or entity verification, but direct marketing requires a separate lawful basis, data-quality controls and compliance with privacy and electronic-communications rules.

What attribution should I use for BOE/BORME data?

For direct reuse, cite the Agencia Estatal Boletin Oficial del Estado and link to BOE. For derived datasets, a safer formula is "Based on data from the Agencia Estatal Boletin Oficial del Estado" plus a link to the original source or legal notice.

Why do aggregators combine BORME with other sources?

BORME explains corporate events, but it does not contain every useful business signal. Procurement, grants, LEI, patents, trademarks, regulator records and sanctions can add context. Combined carefully, these sources create a more useful company profile while preserving traceability.

Sources and Further Reading

• BOE Open Data API
• BOE/BORME dataset on datos.gob.es
• BOE legal notice and reuse conditions
• Law 37/2007 on public-sector information reuse
• Regulation (EU) 2023/138 on high-value datasets
• Colegio de Registradores mercantile statistics
• Colegio de Registradores OpenData portal
• INE DIRCE metadata
• Public procurement open datasets
• BDNS grants and subsidies dataset
• OEPM OpenData
• CNMC Data reuse conditions
• OpenMercantil source map
• OpenMercantil API
• Central de Comunicacion company lists with emails and phones
• eInforma company reports