--- title: "France: SIRENE, and a ceiling on bare names" summary: "SIRENE. At parity, measured without model spend." canonical_url: https://entitybind.com/coverage/france last_updated: 2026-10-12 copy: full --- # France: SIRENE, and a ceiling on bare names > SIRENE. At parity, measured without model spend. Canonical page: https://entitybind.com/coverage/france Last updated: 2026-10-12 ## What a file from France resolves to The rows that are one company, the matches we would refuse, and the column that decides the rest. Send us the file. We tell you which of its rows are one company, which of the matches you already hold we would not have made, and which rows we will not call — each naming the column of yours that would have settled it. An abstention costs zero, and we write nothing to your systems. - What a file gets right: 5 listed - Gaps named below: 5 - Evidence behind this register: At parity, measured without model spend - Questions answered below: 3 - Instrument: Spend-free A first file from France: A few hundred rows, whatever columns they carry. Every row comes back with a decision, the citation behind it and a receipt. [Start free →](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) Self-service. Create your workspace online and verify your email to start matching company records. Free starts with 300 credits and no card. Paid monthly plans are available in workspace Billing; VAT is added where applicable. Usage is tracked without automatic overage charges. [Trust and security](https://entitybind.com/trust) By [James Rooney](https://entitybind.com/about), founder of Entity Bind · Last revised 12 October 2026 ## The register, counted Unique normalised name: 67.96% of the 5,841,117 legal persons on SIRENE carry a name that is unique once normalised. The United Kingdom baseline is 99.53% of 5,464,811 live companies. Licence: Licence Ouverte 2.0. Open, storable and resellable — the largest single tranche of resale-safe company records available anywhere. [check a company on the register yourself →](https://annuaire-entreprises.data.gouv.fr/) · [how this figure and every other one was measured →](https://entitybind.com/accuracy) · [cite it: the five-register census, with a CSV →](https://entitybind.com/research/company-name-uniqueness) A file of bare names cannot beat that census, whatever engine reads it. One sample tells you what your own columns do against it. [Start free →](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) ## What works One line per shape of file, each with the count it was measured over. Send the columns named here and this is what comes back. - A file carrying SIREN. France runs one company register, so a SIREN qualified by the country is decisive where a company number plus a bare country code is not — identifier tier 3,000 of 3,000 on the wide fixture, with zero false binds. - A file carrying a town or a postcode alongside the name: 2,998 of 3,000 on the name-and-postcode tier, at the United Kingdom's own level, with no model spend at all. - Establishment-level facts. SIRET names one site of one legal unit, and France is the only jurisdiction where the register publishes that link, so site-level questions are answerable here and nowhere else. - Resale rights that are enforceable rather than merely offered. Licence Ouverte 2.0 material is stored as open-tier, and the write path refuses to store anything it may not resell before any write happens. - French officer names and roles, under the register's own licence and inside the same personal-data boundary that governs the United Kingdom: names and roles only, no dates of birth, no nationalities, no personal contact details. Those counts come off our own fixture. The one that decides your project is the same measurement run on your rows. [Start free →](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) ## What it will not do A limit found in week three of an integration costs more than a limit read here. 01. A French file of bare names has a structural ceiling near 67.96%, and no engineering lifts it. Quote a French name-only rate normalised against that ceiling or not at all; an absolute figure compared against a British one is a comparison of two registers pretending to be a comparison of two engines. 02. SIRET is not a company identifier. Two rows carrying different SIRETs are very often one company with two sites, so a pipeline keyed on SIRET fragments a supplier master instead of deduplicating it. 03. No live-adjudicated French recording has been run. The name tiers here are predicted from the census and the UK-measured conversion rather than measured in France, and the prediction is on the record in advance: around 67% absolute on name-and-country, with the shortlist carrying the rest. 04. SIRENE registers natural persons as well as companies. Entrepreneurs individuels, whose registered name is a person's name, are excluded from every fixture on the same rule that keeps them out of storage — which is also what makes the French and British universes comparable at all. 05. About 0.07% of live SIRENs begin with a zero, and a pipeline that strips leading zeros under an assumption borrowed from another register will fail to find exactly those. The behaviour is pinned by a test here; it is worth checking in your own extract. Internal fixtures only. The historical 2026-08-29 per-tier recording covers 317 GB companies with identifier-rich arrivals seeding the catalogue first; the context tier includes country and registered-town prose. Its legacy replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot certify current calibration. The September 5 CI reports cover 1,176 labelled pairs and 705 records over 250 companies using offline stubs. These are not independent customer holdouts or live production validation; the 99% minimum-input product target remains unmet. Scope is company and organisation identity only — not people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions or emissions. Results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. If one of those gaps decides your project, contact us before integrating. You can create your Free workspace online to inspect your own rows; an assisted first file can compare them with your incumbent’s matches and name the ones we would not have made. [Start free →](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) ## France, in detail Registers differ more than engines do. These are the properties of this one that change what your file gets back. Before you send a French file, one number sets what it can reach. Only 67.96% of the 5,841,117 legal persons on the SIRENE register carry a name that is unique once case, punctuation and legal form are stripped. A third of French companies share their exact name — 1,003 live companies sit on one name. A French file needs a town or postcode column, and with one it measured 2,998 of 3,000 on the postcode tier. That ceiling belongs to the register rather than to any engine. Where 1,003 live companies sit on one normalised name, no algorithm picks the right one from the name alone, and a French match rate that looks like a British one is measuring something other than the name. What you get here instead is what you get everywhere: a ranked shortlist and the column that would have decided. That column is a town or a postcode, and with one, France measured at the United Kingdom's own level on the name-and-postcode tier. Everything else about France is unusually good. SIRENE is published under Licence Ouverte 2.0, which makes it the largest tranche of resale-safe company data in the inventory; it is reached through the French state's own keyless search API, so there is no key to obtain and no vendor in the middle; and it is the only register anywhere that publishes the link from a site to the legal entity running it. No registry in any other country records that a given warehouse or shop belongs to a particular legal entity — France does, through SIRET, which is why site-level presence ships for France and is stated as non-derivable everywhere else. The parity measurement: Measured on a run that made no model calls anywhere and therefore bought no adjudicator's verdict — the spend-free instrument. The fixture came from this register's own bulk snapshot, drawn by the same builder that produced the UK's: a repeatable seeded sample that then pulls in every live company sharing a name with a sampled one, so the ambiguity in the fixture is the register's own rather than a thinned sample of it. It covers identifiers, the name-and-postcode tier, retrieval and fragmentation. It does not carry the live-adjudicated name tiers across, and no live-adjudicated rate is claimed for this register until its own recording leg runs. France met the contract on every factor — identifier 3,000 of 3,000, name-and-postcode 2,998 of 3,000, wrong-town retrieval 3,000 of 3,000, zero false binds — contributing to the combined 0.999955 measured across United Kingdom, United States (Colorado) and EMEA (France and Norway). ### Where the census comes from - [Annuaire des Entreprises](https://annuaire-entreprises.data.gouv.fr/): The SIRENE universe, through the keyless government search route. A third of these companies share their exact name, which is a fact about France rather than about the resolver. ## The identifier columns a France file arrives carrying Most decisive first. Whether an agreeing value settles a pair on its own, or only narrows the field, is answered on the identifier's own page — along with what goes wrong with the column in a real file. - [SIREN / SIRET](https://entitybind.com/identifiers/siren-siret) (Identifier): SIREN names the French legal unit and settles a match on its own. SIRET adds a five-digit site code, so a company with forty sites has forty and one SIREN. - [Company number](https://entitybind.com/identifiers/company-number) (Identifier): A company number names a registration, not a company: 220 of 232 jurisdictions run more than one register, so it decides only once the register is named. ## The other registers we have measured Four jurisdictions, each measured one register at a time. A map shaded in by region would say more and mean less: an adapter with no fixture behind it has no measured quality, and none is quoted for it. - [United Kingdom](https://entitybind.com/coverage/united-kingdom) (5 named gaps): Baseline register, live-adjudicated - [United States](https://entitybind.com/coverage/united-states) (5 named gaps): At parity in part, with the failing factor named - [Norway](https://entitybind.com/coverage/norway) (4 named gaps): At parity, measured without model spend If your file spans more than one of these registers, one sample tells you more than four pages will. [Start free →](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) ## Start with a file from France. A Sprint runs over the public API on a copy of your file and writes nothing to your CRM, ERP, MDM or warehouse. The audit pack: twelve files, a receipt per decision, and a report that opens offline. [Start free](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) · [Plans and prices](https://entitybind.com/pricing) 300 credits. No card. For a guided review of your file, explore [the Merge Safety Sprint](https://entitybind.com/audit-pack). ## Questions about France ### Why is French entity resolution harder than British? Because the registers are different, not because the engine is. 67.96% of the 5,841,117 legal persons on SIRENE have a name that is unique once case, punctuation and legal form are stripped, against 99.53% of 5,464,811 live companies at Companies House. A third of French companies share their exact name — 1,003 live companies sit on one name. A French file needs a town or postcode column, and with one it measured 2,998 of 3,000 on the postcode tier. Street-named civil companies do this at four-figure scale, which is a real feature of how French property companies are named rather than a data-quality accident. The consequence for a buyer is precise and actionable: a French file of bare names has a ceiling around 67.96% that no resolver can lift, and the same file with a town column does not. ### What should a French file contain? A SIREN if you have one, and a town or postcode column if you do not. SIREN is decisive — France runs one company register, so the number qualified by the country is unambiguous, and the identifier tier measured 3,000 of 3,000 on the wide fixture with zero false binds. Failing that, a town or postcode turns the hardest register in the measured set into one that performs at the United Kingdom's level: 2,998 of 3,000 on the name-and-postcode tier. Send SIRET as well if you need site-level answers, but do not key your deduplication on it — a company with forty sites has forty SIRETs and one SIREN. ### Is French coverage as good as UK coverage? On the things that were measured, yes. France met the parity contract on identifiers, the name-and-postcode tier, retrieval and fragmentation, with zero false binds, contributing to a combined 0.999955 against a 0.9565 bar. Measured with no model spend at all, on identifier and digital tiers plus retrieval and fragmentation, using the same seeded, sibling-complete builder in every register. It does not carry the live-adjudicated name tiers across, which rest on jurisdiction-free calibration keys and have been recorded in the UK only. What is not equal is the name-only case, and that gap is the register's rather than ours: 67.96% against 99.53%. And no live-adjudicated French recording has been run, so the French name-tier figures are predictions with a published number attached rather than measurements. --- Entity Bind resolves companies and organisations only. 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