SIREN and SIRET (SIREN / SIRET)
An agreeing value settles the pair on its own, in the stage that compares identifiers and calls no model.
Unique within: France. SIREN is unique in the French register and means nothing outside it.
What your SIREN / SIRET column does in Entity Bind
A SIREN settles a pair on its own, through the same registration-number rule a UK company number reaches in the stage that compares identifier values. Send it as `registration_number` with country FR. It is supplied by the live SIRENE source through the French state's keyless search API and carried in the crosswalk as a company number. SIRENE is also why the record model holds establishment-level facts at all: it is the one register anywhere that records which site belongs to which legal entity, so those facts exist for France, and they are labelled as French.
Your own column will carry gaps and typos the specimen does not, and a few hundred rows will show how much of your file it still settles.
Start freeOn this page
Issuer, shape and a specimen
Every row below is checkable in another tab: the body that assigns the identifier, the exact shape including any check digits, and a specimen value. Where we hold a value we have verified against the issuing body, the specimen is that value; where we do not, it is a shape, labelled as one.
- Issued by
- INSEE, the French national statistics institute, which operates the SIRENE register.
- Unique within
- France. SIREN is unique in the French register and means nothing outside it.
- Format
- SIREN is nine digits, the last of them computed from the other eight as a Luhn check, so a mistyped SIREN is usually detectable on its own. SIRET is fourteen digits: the nine-digit SIREN of the legal unit followed by a five-digit NIC that names one establishment of it. The two are commonly printed with spaces, and about 0.07% of live SIRENs begin with a zero — which matters, because a pipeline that strips leading zeros under an assumption borrowed from another register will silently fail to find them.
- What one value identifies
- SIREN identifies the legal unit — the company. SIRET identifies one establishment of it: a site, a branch, a shop. They are not interchangeable, and the difference is the single most common French data error we see: two SIRETs sharing a SIREN are one company with two sites, not two companies.
- Specimen
- Shape only: 000 000 000 for a SIREN and 000 000 000 00000 for a SIRET. Every French company's real number is one click away at annuaire-entreprises.data.gouv.fr, and we have not verified a specimen of our own against the register.
What goes wrong with SIREN / SIRET
The failure modes that decide whether this column is worth sending, and what each one costs you once it turns up in a live file. Worth reading before you plan an integration around the column.
- 01
Decisive for SIREN, not for SIRET. A SIRET agreement tells you two rows describe the same establishment; a SIRET disagreement tells you nothing about whether the companies differ, because the same company routinely holds dozens. Send the SIREN column if the question is which company, and keep the SIRET for the question of which site.
- 02
The French register has a name problem no resolver can fix, and it is why the SIREN column matters more in France than a company number does elsewhere. Only 67.96% of the 5,841,117 legal persons on the SIRENE register carry a name that is still unique once case, punctuation and legal-form suffixes 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.
- 03
France runs one company register, which is what makes a SIREN plus a country code safe where a company number plus a country code is not. That safety comes from a property of France rather than from anything the engine checked: the register-shape table that protects GB numbers covers GB only, and for every other country the engine records no opinion rather than guessing. Adding a country means adding its registers and a labelled pair set that measures the change.
- 04
SIRENE registers natural persons as well as companies — entrepreneurs individuels, whose registered name is a person's name. Those 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, since Companies House never registers sole traders at all.
- 05
The French parity result is a spend-free measurement, not a live-adjudicated one. France met the parity contract — the rule that a new region must measure at least as well as the United Kingdom baseline before anything is claimed for it — on identifier, name-plus-postcode, retrieval and fragmentation, which counts one company split across several clusters, with no model calls at all. The recording leg that would convert the name tiers from predicted to measured has not been run, and until it is, no live-adjudicated French rate is claimed.
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 is already in your file, a sample turns it into a number of rows instead of a suspicion.
Start freeThe other identifiers on a company record
4 of the 8 settle a pair on their own; the other 4 narrow the field and hand the decision on. If your file carries more than one of them, the question worth settling is which one is doing the work.
LEI
Decides a matchLegal Entity Identifier
Company number
Decides a matchCompany registration number
CIK
Does not decideCentral Index Key
Ticker
Does not decideExchange ticker symbol
D-U-N-S
Decides a matchData Universal Numbering System number
VAT number
Does not decideVAT registration number
EUID
Does not decideEuropean Unique Identifier
Or try your own rows: create your Free workspace and upload a company CSV to inspect the decisions and receipts. Where a further column would settle an unresolved row, it names that column; contact us for an assisted review.
Start freeWhere SIREN / SIRET shows up elsewhere
The rest of the answer, on the shelves that hold it. Each card names its own — a register, a definition, a guide or a comparison — and opens on the page that carries it at length.
- JurisdictionFranceSIRENE under Licence Ouverte 2.0, storable and resellable, and the only register that links a site to the legal entity running it. Bare names meet a ceiling.
- DefinitionSIREN and SIRETSIREN is the nine-digit identifier France assigns to a legal unit and SIRET is the fourteen-digit identifier of one of its establishments — the same company at two different levels of granularity.
- DefinitionDeterministic matchingDeterministic matching decides a pair by an explicit rule — usually agreement on a strong identifier — and produces the same verdict every time with no score in between.
- DefinitionFragmentationFragmentation is the opposite failure to over-merging: one real entity split across several clusters, so the same company is counted, contracted with or invoiced more than once.
- GuideCompany identifiers explainedCompany number, LEI, CIK, ticker, SIREN and SIRET, DUNS, VAT, EUID and ISIN. What each identifies, who issues it, what it does not guarantee, and which ones actually decide a match.
- GuideHow to deduplicate a supplier masterDuplicate vendors, payment leakage, remittance conflicts and parent concentration. The accounts payable playbook for finding which vendor records are one company, with a citation for every finding.
Sources
The bodies and records this page quotes about SIREN / SIRET, each with the caveat that travels with it.
- Annuaire des Entreprises
The keyless government search route to the SIRENE universe. What it cannot fix is that a third of French companies share their exact name.
- Licence Ouverte 2.0 (Etalab)
The licence SIRENE data is reused under. It permits free reuse, including commercial reuse, with attribution.
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Questions about SIREN / SIRET
How do I avoid treating two French establishments as two companies?
Preserve SIREN and SIRET as text in separate columns. Two fictional branches with different five-digit establishment suffixes can share one nine-digit SIREN. Check the legal unit and establishment records in Annuaire des Entreprises. Use the legal-unit identity when reviewing a company duplicate and retain the establishment information for site-level work. Do not convert a differing SIRET into a legal-company contradiction.
Should I send SIREN or SIRET?
SIREN, if the question is which company. SIREN names the legal unit; SIRET is the SIREN plus a five-digit establishment code, so a company with forty sites has forty SIRETs and one SIREN. Two rows carrying different SIRETs are very often the same company, which means a pipeline keyed on SIRET fragments a supplier master rather than deduplicating it. Send SIRET as well if you need site-level answers — France is the only jurisdiction whose register publishes the site-to-legal-entity link at all, so it is the only place we can give them.
Why does a French file need a town or postcode column?
Because the French register is 67.96% unique on bare company names against the United Kingdom's 99.53%, and no resolver can resolve a genuinely ambiguous name. That is a property of the register rather than of the engine, measured over 5,841,117 legal persons on the SIRENE register, and the engine answers it the only way it can — with a ranked shortlist and the field that would have decided. 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. Every figure in that sentence was measured on the spend-free instrument, with no model calls at all.