The statutes of a Belgian company are public. The full consolidated text has been free online for several years, as a searchable PDF, with no login. Yet most guides send you to the Belgian Official Gazette, which is the one place the full statutes are not published.
That distinction is the whole point of this guide. There are three routes, they hand you different documents, and which one works depends on a single question: was the deed passed before a notary?
The short version
You can look up the statutes of a Belgian company or non-profit free of charge through three routes, depending on what you need: the full consolidated statutes in the notaries' statutes database, the deed of incorporation and every later amendment in the annexes to the Belgian Official Gazette, and anything from before 1 May 2019 or a private deed at the registry of the enterprise court. A sole proprietorship has no statutes, so you will not find any for one anywhere.
What you need | Where |
The full, current consolidated statutes | The notaries' statutes database, free |
The extract of the incorporation deed, and what changed since | Annexes to the Belgian Official Gazette, free |
Anything before 1 May 2019, or a private deed | Registry of the enterprise court |
Changes across many companies at once (new directors, capital, moves), as a list you can act on | Gazette publications (incorporation, amendments to the statutes) per company in Bizzy, filterable by legal form and incorporation date |
Route one: the statutes database
This is the least known route and the most rewarding.
Its official name is Statuten en vertegenwoordigingsbevoegdheden, statutes and powers of representation, and it runs at statuten.notaris.be. Legal writing calls it the statutendatabank, and the application itself is named Stapor. Those are three names for one service, not three services.
It has a statutory basis in article 2:7, § 2 of the Belgian Code of Companies and Associations, and is operated by the Royal Federation of Belgian Notaries.
What you get. The full consolidated statutes, as a PDF with a real text layer. Not a scan, not an extract. You can search it and copy from it. We pulled a 23-page document with no account, no captcha and no payment.
How you search. By enterprise number only. There is no name field. If you only have a name, look it up in KBO Public Search first and bring the number with you.
Second tab. Under powers of representation you find the history of the clauses that determine who may represent the company. That is exactly what you want to know before anyone signs a contract.
The mistake that is almost everywhere
Any number of Belgian accountancy and law-firm pages state that the database only covers legal entities incorporated from 1 May 2019. That is wrong.
The date refers to when the deed was filed, not when the company was founded. Any company that has had a notarial deed about its statutes passed since 1 May 2019 is in there, however old it is.
We checked. Etablissementen Franz Colruyt, an NV since 9 March 1950, has five versions in the database, the most recent from October 2025. Anheuser-Busch InBev has twenty-five. A company from 1950 that amended its statutes in 2023 is simply present.
What you will not find is a consolidated version from before 1 May 2019. The database says so itself: for older consolidated statutes you have to go to the registry of the competent enterprise court.
Why a non-profit is often missing
The database holds statutes arising from notarial deeds. That is where the boundary sits.
Article 2:5 of the Code of Companies and Associations sets out which kind of deed each legal form requires:
Legal form | Incorporation deed | In the database? |
BV (private limited company), CV, NV, European company, SCE | Notarial, mandatory | Yes, after a notarial deed since 1/5/2019 |
International non-profit, foundation, public-interest foundation | Notarial, mandatory | Yes, after a notarial deed since 1/5/2019 |
VOF, CommV, EEIG | Notarial or private, founders' choice | Only if they used a notary |
VZW (non-profit association) | Notarial or private, founders' choice | Only if they used a notary |
This is counter-intuitive. An ordinary non-profit may draw up its statutes privately, in which case nothing reaches the database. An international non-profit or a foundation must use a notary, and so is present. We confirmed the latter on a public-interest foundation.
Article 2:5, § 4 adds that every amendment to the statutes must take the same form as the incorporation deed. A non-profit that started privately therefore usually stays private.
One warning about reading an empty result: the database shows the same message whether the deed was private or the entity simply has not passed a notarial deed since 2019. An empty result does not prove the deed was private.
Route two: the annexes to the Belgian Official Gazette
This is where everyone sends you, and it is useful, but you need to know what it does and does not give you.
Search the Bijlage van de Rechtspersonen, the legal entities annex. You can search by enterprise number, name, postcode, address, publication number, publication date and legal form, plus a dropdown for the subject of the deed. Two subjects matter for this guide: incorporation ("rubriek oprichting") and statutes covering translation, coordination and other amendments ("statuten (vertaling, coördinatie, overige wijzigingen, enz...)").
An extract, not the full text. What you get is the extract, not the full statutes. That is not an accident, it is how the law is written. The full, updated and consolidated text of the statutes is indeed filed in the legal person's dossier, but of that document the annexes only publish "a notice of its subject": a message saying that the document exists. The extract of the incorporation deed itself does carry the essentials, such as legal form, name, registered office, duration, founders and contributions.
Scans without a text layer. We downloaded a PDF and inspected its structure: an image file, no fonts, bitonal compression. There is no text layer. You cannot search it or copy from it without running OCR. That is the sharpest practical contrast with the statutes database.
There is also no search of the contents of the deeds. You search the characteristics of the publication, not what it says.
How far back it goes. In practice you get a scanned PDF with publications from 1997 onward. Older entries appear in the index, with name, legal form, address, subject and publication number, but without a document. We inferred that from the complete publication history of a single company, 290 entries, and there is no official statement of a digitisation cut-off to set against it. Treat 1997 as a rule of thumb.
Publication follows within ten days of filing.
Route three: the court registry
For everything the first two routes miss, the registry of the enterprise court still holds the complete dossier. That includes the first version of the statutes together with the incorporation deed, and the updated consolidated text accompanying every amendment.
The law is explicit about the cost: anyone may inspect the filed documents relating to a given legal person free of charge. For a copy you pay registry fees. We were not able to locate the tariff, so we are not quoting a figure.
This is the only route for consolidated statutes from before 1 May 2019, and for legal persons that never went near a notary.
Start with the enterprise number
All three routes work best with an enterprise number, and the statutes database accepts nothing else. KBO Public Search is therefore the first step whenever you start from a name.
A useful detail: the company page in the Crossroads Bank for Enterprises (KBO/BCE) carries an external links block pointing at all three sources, including the statutes database, which the KBO itself labels as "notarial deeds". Follow that link and you skip the confusion in this guide entirely.
Statutes in Belgium: how many companies and non-profits there are
Belgium has 579,939 active BVs, 134,962 non-profits and 70,243 NVs (Bizzy, October 2026). Which route to the statutes works depends largely on that legal form, because not every legal form requires a notary, and a sole proprietorship has no statutes at all.
Legal form | Active entities | Notarial incorporation mandatory |
BV | 579,939 | Yes |
VZW | 134,962 | No |
VOF and CommV | 90,558 | No |
NV | 70,243 | Yes |
CV | 7,680 | Yes |
Source: Bizzy, count of all active Belgian entities by legal form, 29 October 2026. Sole proprietorships are not included in this table.
A BV, NV or CV always starts from a notarial deed, so for deeds since 1 May 2019 you will find the consolidated statutes in the statutes database. A VZW, VOF or CommV can be set up without a notary. If there is no notarial deed, there is nothing in the statutes database, and the Official Gazette and the court registry are what remain.
New businesses: most have no statutes
Bizzy counted 137,835 newly founded businesses between 29 October 2025 and 29 October 2026, and 77,081 of them are sole proprietorships. A sole proprietorship is not a separate legal person: the entrepreneur is the business. So there are no statutes, no incorporation deed in the Official Gazette and nothing in the statutes database.
Legal form | Newly founded in 12 months | Statutes? |
All new businesses | 137,835 | Depends on the legal form |
Sole proprietorship | 77,081 | No |
BV | 41,166 | Yes, through a notarial deed |
VZW | 4,630 | Yes, notarial or private |
NV | 327 | Yes, through a notarial deed |
Source: Bizzy, October 2026, newly founded Belgian businesses from 29/10/2025 to 29/10/2026. Not every legal form is listed, so the rows do not add up to the total.
The pace is high: according to Bizzy, 20,664 new businesses have been added since 1 September 2026. For a BV, NV, CV or VZW, the incorporation appears in the annexes to the Official Gazette, which makes a young company easy to follow. For a sole proprietorship you do not look for statutes; instead you check the legal form and start date in the KBO.
What to do with the statutes
The statutes tell you who may sign, what the company was set up to do, and how its board is composed. For a commercial assessment that is half the picture. The other half is in the numbers.
How to read a Belgian company's annual accounts covers where to find the filed figures, and solvency, liquidity and profitability covers which ratios move first when something is going wrong. If matters have gone further than that, how to check whether a Belgian company is bankrupt explains which registers give a definitive answer.
For the full picture of what the Belgian register publishes, start at the Belgian company register, and for the publications themselves at searching the Belgian Official Gazette.
A bank or a foreign registry asking for proof of registration usually wants a certified extract: how to order a KBO extract.
For associations, the accounts follow their own rules: annual accounts of a Belgian VZW.
Statutes are one check among many: a first-pass due diligence on a Belgian company.
Statutes and Bizzy: everything around the statutes in one overview
The three routes above each give you one document for one company. What happens around those statutes, you see in Bizzy in one overview per company: the legal form and incorporation date from the KBO, the directors, and the official publications from the Official Gazette, such as appointments and dismissals, restructurings and amendments to the statutes, searchable and filterable by type and date. You still open the full consolidated statutes in the statutes database afterwards, but by then you already know which amendment you are looking for and since when.
What you want to know | Through the official sources | In Bizzy |
|---|---|---|
Legal form and incorporation date | KBO Public Search, one company at a time | In the overview of every company |
Who sits on the board | Read the appointments in the Official Gazette | Directors in the same overview |
What changed in the statutes | Search the Official Gazette annexes by heading | Publications per company, filterable by type and date |
Whether something new was published | Go back and check yourself | New publications as signals |
All BVs incorporated since a given date | Browse the Official Gazette day by day | Filter on legal form and incorporation date |
Source: KBO Public Search (FPS Economy), Belgian Official Gazette, statuten.notaris.be; Bizzy, October 2026.
From legal form and incorporation date to a prospect list
If you want to reach a whole group rather than check one company, turn it around. In Bizzy you filter by legal form and incorporation date, for example all BVs founded since 1 September 2026, and narrow it down further by revenue, equity, debt ratio or headcount. You export that prospect list or push it to HubSpot, and you follow new Gazette publications, such as an amendment to the statutes, as a signal.
See how Bizzy works for you
Build a prospect list in Bizzy by legal form and incorporation date, with each company's Gazette publications alongside. Book a demo with our team, or try Bizzy yourself.
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Frequently asked questions
Where do I find the full statutes of a Belgian company?
In the notaries' statutes database at statuten.notaris.be. It provides the full consolidated statutes as a searchable PDF, free and without an account, provided a notarial deed about the statutes has been filed since 1 May 2019.
Are the full statutes in the Belgian Official Gazette?
No. The annexes publish the extract of the incorporation deed, and for the consolidated statutes only a notice of the subject. The full text is filed in the legal person's dossier but is not published in full.
Does the statutes database only cover companies incorporated after 1 May 2019?
No, that is a widespread misconception. The date refers to the filing of the deed. A company from 1950 that amended its statutes before a notary after 1 May 2019 is simply in the database.
Why can't I find a non-profit's statutes?
Most likely because the deed was drawn up privately. A Belgian non-profit may adopt its statutes by private deed, in which case nothing reaches the statutes database. In that case, search the annexes to the Official Gazette or go to the registry of the enterprise court.
Does a sole proprietorship have statutes?
No. A sole proprietorship is not a separate legal person, so there are no statutes and no incorporation deed. That applies to a large share of new businesses: of the 137,835 businesses founded between 29 October 2025 and 29 October 2026, 77,081 were sole proprietorships (Bizzy, October 2026). You can read the legal form and start date in the KBO.
Can I search the statutes database by company name?
No, only by enterprise number. Look the name up in KBO Public Search first and use the number you find there.
What does it cost to obtain statutes?
The statutes database and the annexes to the Official Gazette are both free to consult. At the court registry, inspecting the filed documents is free by law; for a copy you pay registry fees.
What can I find about companies in the Belgian Official Gazette?
The deeds and extracts the law requires to be published: incorporation, amendments to the statutes, appointments and resignations of directors, transfers of the registered office, capital changes and dissolutions. Not the full consolidated statutes, and not the annual accounts. What each subject means is explained in searching the Belgian Official Gazette.
Sources
Bizzy, October 2026: count of all active Belgian entities by legal form, and of newly founded businesses from 29/10/2025 to 29/10/2026 and since 1 September 2026.
Royal Federation of Belgian Notaries, statutes database Statuten en vertegenwoordigingsbevoegdheden: statuten.notaris.be.
Belgian Official Gazette, FPS Justice: Bijlage van de Rechtspersonen.
FPS Justice, registries of the enterprise courts: inspection and copies of the documents filed by a legal person.
Belgian Code of Companies and Associations, articles 2:5 and 2:7.
FPS Economy: KBO Public Search.
Written by Arthur Cremers at Bizzy, which builds B2B company data from the official registers and enriches it with online sources such as company websites, news sites, LinkedIn and Google Maps.