How to Find Companies in France: A Guide to the SIRENE Register
To find companies in France, start from the free public register of every company: how it works, what it holds and how to turn it into a prospect list you can legally email.
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Overview
If you sell to French businesses, you do not need to buy a list. France publishes a register of every company it knows — active or closed, sole trader or group — with its activity, address and size band, and anyone can query it for free. This guide explains what the register is, how to search it by trade and area, what it does not contain (emails), and how to prospect the companies you find without breaking French rules.
The register: SIRENE, the RNE and the free search API
Every business in France gets a SIREN number from INSEE, the national statistics office, when it is created. The SIRENE database holds those companies and their establishments; the national company register (RNE) holds their legal filings. The State publishes both through a free search service, the API Recherche d'entreprises, and a public website, the Annuaire des Entreprises.
For prospecting, the API is the useful part: no account, no key, and filters on exactly what a sales team needs. It answers up to 25 companies per page and stops counting at 10,000 results per search, so narrow searches (one trade, one département) are the norm. Our free French company search runs those queries for you and shows the count and a sample.
- SIREN: 9 digits, one per company, never reused
- SIRET: 14 digits, one per establishment (SIREN + 5-digit establishment number)
- Activity: the NAF code of the company's declared main activity
- Size: an INSEE headcount band (e.g. 01 = 1–2 employees, 03 = 6–9)
- Status: active or closed, creation date, head-office address
Searching by trade: NAF codes
The register does not know "plumbers" or "accountants"; it knows NAF codes, the French activity nomenclature (rev. 2, 732 sub-classes). Plumbing is 43.22A, electrical installation 43.21A, accounting firms 69.20Z, web agencies usually 62.01Z or 73.11Z, restaurants 56.10A to 56.10C. A trade often spans several codes, and a code describes the declared main activity, not always the exact job — a heating engineer can be filed under plumbing.
Start broad (two or three codes), then read a sample of the companies to check the codes match what you sell to. The company search tool turns a trade typed in plain words into codes for you and shows which codes it used.
Filtering by area and size
France is divided into 101 départements (numbered 01 to 95, plus 2A and 2B for Corsica and 971 to 976 overseas). Filtering by département is the simplest geographic cut; the register matches a company when any of its establishments (head office or branch) is there, and postal codes and regions work too. For size, the register uses INSEE bands rather than exact headcounts: "1 to 9 employees" means bands 01, 02 and 03, and companies with no declared employee are a separate class — often the majority in trades like construction.
Size changes the message more than anything else. A sole trader reads email between jobs on a phone; a 50-person firm has an office manager who forwards it. Decide the band first, then write for it.
What the register does not give you: emails
The register holds no email address and no phone number. Most French companies publish a contact address on their own website, often in the legal notice page ("mentions légales") that French law requires on business sites. That address, found on the company's own site and verified before sending, is the most defensible one to use. Use our company lookup to confirm a company's SIREN, activity and leaders before you write, and verify every address before the first send.
Some entrepreneurs ask for their data not to be published ("non-diffusion"). They do not appear in public results, and they should never be prospected from the register.
French rules for B2B prospecting by email
France allows B2B email prospecting without prior consent when the message concerns the recipient's professional activity, the address is linked to their function, they are told where their address came from, and they can object simply — the position of the CNIL, the French data protection authority. Sole traders are natural persons, so their professional address is personal data: keep the message about their business, and stop at the first objection.
In practice: one email per person, written for their trade, with the source of the address and a one-line way to say no. The French guides go further: the mandatory mentions of a B2B email and finding a SIREN or SIRET.
- Message about their job, sent to an address tied to their job
- Say where the address came from in the first email
- Offer a one-reply opt-out, and honour it everywhere
- Exclude companies that opted out of publication
From register to reply, step by step
Mailbase runs that whole chain: you describe your customer, it extracts every matching company from the register, finds and verifies the email on each company's site, and drafts one email per person for you to approve.
- Pick the trade and translate it into two or three NAF codes.
- Choose the département(s) and the size band you can serve.
- Count and sample the companies with the free company search.
- Find each company's website and the address it publishes.
- Verify every address before the first send.
- Write one short email per person, about their trade, with the source and an opt-out.
- Send a few a day from a warmed-up domain, and stop at the first reply.
Common Mistakes
- Going wide with a huge generic list instead of a tight, ICP-matched one.
- Treating the prospect list as a one-time export instead of a living asset.
- Optimizing send volume while ignoring the reply/follow-up bottleneck.
- Buying or scraping a list and tanking deliverability with complaints.
Sources & Further Reading
Official docs for current setup details, pricing, and API behavior — verify specifics there, since they change.
Related guides
More on find companies in france and the surrounding lead generation workflow: