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Search Norwegian legal entities

Source: R/entities.R
brreg_search.Rd

Query the Central Coordinating Register by name, legal form, industry, geography, and other criteria. Results are paginated automatically up to max_results.

Usage

brreg_search(
  name = NULL,
  legal_form = NULL,
  municipality_code = NULL,
  nace_code = NULL,
  min_employees = NULL,
  max_employees = NULL,
  bankrupt = NULL,
  parent_org_nr = NULL,
  max_results = 200,
  registry = c("enheter", "underenheter"),
  type = c("code", "label")
)

Arguments

name

Character. Entity name (partial match, case-insensitive).

Character. Legal form code: "AS", "ASA", "ENK", etc. See legal_forms for valid codes.

municipality_code

Character. 4-digit Norwegian municipality code.

nace_code

Character. NACE industry code (e.g. "64.190").

min_employees, max_employees

Integer. Employee count range. For privacy the register refuses a range that lies within one to four employees (HTTP 400, tidybrreg_error_http with the register's message); ranges starting at 0 or at 5 and above are served.

bankrupt

Logical. If TRUE, return only bankrupt entities. Only supported for registry = "enheter"; supplying it for "underenheter" is an error.

parent_org_nr

Character. Filter to subsidiaries of this org.

max_results

Integer. Maximum entities to return (default 200). Values above the 10,000 result window are allowed but abort when the register reports more matches than the window can deliver.

registry

One of "enheter" (main entities, default) or "underenheter" (sub-entities / establishments). Sub-entities use beliggenhetsadresse.kommunenummer instead of kommunenummer for geographic filtering, and the bankrupt parameter is not available.

type

A type of variables: "code" (default) returns raw codes, "label" returns English labels for coded columns.

Value

A tibble with one row per entity. Column names follow the package field dictionary (field_dict); only observed fields are emitted (see brreg_entity()). Attributes: total_matches, the number of matches the register reported, and complete, FALSE when fewer rows were returned than matched. A valid empty result is a zero-row tibble with character columns org_nr, name and legal_form.

Common codes for the legal_form parameter:

  • AS: Private limited company (like UK Ltd, German GmbH)

  • ASA: Public limited company (like UK PLC, German AG)

  • ENK: Sole proprietorship

  • NUF: Norwegian-registered foreign entity (branch office)

See legal_forms for the complete list with English translations.

Result window

The search endpoints allow a page size of up to 10,000 but reject any page where size * (page + 1) exceeds 10,000 (observed 2026-08-08: a Bergen municipality query reported 57,954 matches; result 10,001 answered HTTP 400 size * (page+1) kan ikke overstige 10_000). A query matching more entities than that window cannot be retrieved completely through search. When the register reports more matches than the window and max_results asks for more than the window, the call aborts with a tidybrreg_error_result_window before any page is returned; narrow the query (for example by municipality_code, legal_form or nace_code), or use brreg_download() for the full register. When max_results is at or below the window the first max_results matches are returned and the result carries complete = FALSE plus a tidybrreg_warning_truncated whenever more matches exist.

Tidy shape

Every tibble the package returns is tidy in Wickham's sense: one observation per row, one variable per column, one observational unit per table. The register nests two kinds of array inside an entity. Arrays of strings (business_address, postal_address, location_address, purpose, activity) are the line fragments of one value and are joined with "\n", which no fragment contains, so strsplit(x, "\n") recovers the lines. Arrays of objects (historiske_navn, annotations, any array of objects the register adds) are observations of another unit and are nested as a list-column of tibbles, one row per element with snake_case columns, NULL for an entity without them; tidyr::unnest() expands them to their own table. An empty array is not an observation and emits no column. Nothing is serialized to JSON text.

See also

brreg_entity() for single lookups, brreg_label() for translating codes to English, tidybrreg_conditions for the errors and warnings signalled.

Other tidybrreg entity functions: brreg_children(), brreg_download(), brreg_entity(), brreg_konsern(), brreg_prokura(), brreg_regnskap(), brreg_roles(), brreg_roles_legal(), brreg_signatur(), brreg_underenheter(), brreg_update_fields(), brreg_updates()

Examples

if (FALSE) { # interactive() && curl::has_internet()
# Search by name
brreg_search(name = "Equinor")

# Large private companies in Oslo
brreg_search(legal_form = "AS", municipality_code = "0301",
             min_employees = 500, max_results = 10)
}