Finding new Belgian companies

Every new Belgian company shows up in a free public source within about two working days of being founded. You get the name, the legal form, the registered office address, the company number and the names of the directors.

What you do not get is a way to contact them. We checked forty companies founded in late August and early September 2026. Not one had a phone number listed in the register.

That gap is what this article is about, along with the question of how many new companies actually appear, and when.

Finding newly founded companies: the sources compared

The three free routes are explained step by step further down. First the figures, because they are misquoted more often than they are quoted correctly.

How many new companies appear

According to Bizzy, 137,835 new Belgian enterprises were added to the Crossroads Bank for Enterprises (CBE) between 29 October 2025 and 29 October 2026. Bizzy counts by founding date in the official registers. More than half of them are sole proprietorships.

Source: Bizzy, new registrations by founding date in the CBE from 29 October 2025 to 29 October 2026, accessed on 29 October 2026.

This is the finding that changes how you approach starters. Of the 137,835 new registrations, 41,493 are a BV or NV. If you sell to companies rather than to the self-employed, roughly half of the headline about "a record number of starters" is not your market. If you prospect companies, filter by legal form first.

Not every new registration is a new company

Large groups regularly set up new companies, for a project, a branch or a restructuring. Over the past year, a bank, an insurance group and a parking company were among those that got a new entity this way. In a bare CBE list, a registration like that looks just as new as a starter.

Bizzy links every legal entity to the company behind it. That lets us see that 571 of the 137,835 new registrations belong to an existing company with 10 or more employees according to the Bizzy size class. If you are looking for starters, these are not starters, and they are often already someone else's customer.

Why Statbel gives a different figure

There is no single Belgian figure for "new companies". Statbel counts VAT status, not registration in the register. According to Statbel's most recent annual figures, there were 113,289 start-ups of VAT-registered enterprises in 2024, 54.2% of them natural persons. An entity that never becomes liable for VAT does not appear in that series. Both figures are correct; they answer different questions. If you want to build a list, you need the register count.

They do not start evenly across the year

According to Bizzy, company formation in Belgium is strongly seasonal, and the pattern is anything but subtle. October, January, April and July stand out above the other months every time.

Source: Bizzy, new registrations by founding date in the CBE per calendar month, accessed on 29 October 2026.

The four months in which a quarter begins accounted for 67,025 of the 145,145 registrations from October 2025 to September 2026 inclusive, or 46% in four months. The weight falls on the first day: on 1 April 2026 alone, 7,050 enterprises were registered, 43% of the whole of April. On 1 October 2026 there were 7,350.

The reason is administrative, not economic: the start of a quarter is the natural start date for an enterprise and its VAT registration. Statbel's first VAT registrations follow the same quarterly rhythm.

For a sales team, that is a planning input, not a curiosity. If you prospect starters, your pool is much bigger in the first month of each quarter: April had 16,442 new registrations, March 9,538. Building the workflow in February and only running it in March is the worst timing imaginable.

The three routes to find them yourself

The Official Gazette, for new companies within a few days

This is the fastest public route, and it works.

In the legal entities annex, set the drop-down for the subject of the deed to the incorporation category and enter a range of publication dates. That returns every newly founded legal entity published in that window. In August 2026 that came to 3,244 results.

If you build the search as a URL instead of filling in the form, the date parameters expect ISO format with the year first. A date written the Belgian way silently returns zero results instead of an error, which makes the search look broken when it is not. A result gives you the name, the legal form, the full address, the company number and a link to the published deed.

We measured the delay rather than assuming it. Every company in the 1 September 2026 publication had been founded on 28 August, and every company in the 8 September publication had been founded on 4 September. That is roughly two working days between incorporation and publication.

Two limitations matter. The category only covers legal entities, so sole proprietorships, which make up more than half of all new registrations, never appear in it. And it also includes the opening of branches, so not every result is a new enterprise.

The Crossroads Bank, which cannot do this

It is the obvious place to look, but CBE Public Search has no filter on start date. We checked all six search forms: by number, by name (phonetic and exact), by activity, by address and by authorisation. Not one of them accepts a date.

The start date does appear on an enterprise's detail page, so you can confirm that a company you already know is new. You cannot ask the register who signed up last week. It is a lookup tool, not a discovery tool.

The Crossroads Bank's open data, with conditions

There is a free open data file of the register that is updated daily and does include a start date as a mandatory field on every entity. Files stay available for 31 days, and there is both a full file and a daily update file. Three things to understand before you build on it.

Registration and licence. You accept terms of use, and the licence ties you to the purpose you stated when you signed up.

Start date by legal form. For a legal entity, it is the start date of the first period in which the entity was active. For a natural person, it is the start of the most recent period of activity. A self-employed person who reactivates a dormant registration therefore gets a fresh start date and looks new when they are not.

Direct marketing. The licence prohibits the use of personal data for direct marketing purposes and states that this specifically covers all data on registered entities that are natural persons. Sole proprietorships therefore fall under it. Whether data on legal entities falls entirely outside that restriction is a reasonable reading, but the licence text does not settle it, and the names of a company's directors are personal data in their own right. This is a question for your lawyer, not for a blog article.

The part nobody mentions: you cannot reach them

This is why prospecting new companies is harder than it sounds. We took forty legal entities founded in late August and early September 2026 and read the register file for each of them.

Source: Bizzy sample, 40 CBE register files of legal entities founded in late August and early September 2026.

The typical file states in so many words that no phone number has been recorded in the CBE. Those fields do exist in the register and are often filled in for established companies, but a two-day-old enterprise has not filled them in yet.

What you actually have on day two is a name, a legal form, an address, a company number, a founding date and the names of the directors. Enough to know a company exists and enough to write to it. Not enough to call anyone.

This is a small sample from a single cohort of legal entities, so treat the proportions as indicative rather than as a population figure. The direction is not in doubt.

What this means in practice

Timing beats volume. The pool peaks in the first month of each quarter, and within that month on the first day. Plan around that, not around a flat monthly average. That makes an incorporation one of the few buying signals with a predictable calendar.

Decide early on sole proprietorships. They make up 56% of new registrations and carry a direct marketing restriction that companies may not. If they are not your market, your real pool of starters is the 41,493 BVs and NVs from the past year, not 137,835.

Filter out the group entities. A new company set up by a bank or an insurance group is not a starter. Without a link to the company behind it, you cannot see that difference.

Plan for an enrichment step. Public sources tell you who was born and where they are based. They do not tell you how to get in touch. Any workflow that assumes otherwise will break on the data.

Building a prospect list of new companies

In Bizzy, you build that list yourself with a filter on founding date, legal form, region and activity. Bizzy starts from the official register data and enriches it with news sites and other online sources, so website, phone and contacts are added as soon as they appear online. On Boost and Scale, agents then top up the list themselves with new registrations that match your filters.

The register tells you that a company exists. The enrichment tells you how to reach the person running it, as soon as that person can be found online.

Further reading

For the same data in the other direction: Belgian bankruptcies in figures and how to check whether a Belgian company is bankrupt. For what the Official Gazette publishes more broadly: searching the Belgian Official Gazette, and for the register itself, the Belgian company register.

The legal form of a new company already tells you a lot, from liability to whether it will file annual accounts: Belgian company forms explained.

Read next: Bizzy vs Sectora: same register, different job

See how Bizzy works for you

Track new companies by founding date, legal form and region, and see their contact details as soon as they appear online. Book a demo with our team, or try Bizzy yourself straight away.

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Frequently asked questions

How many new companies were added in Belgium over the past year?

Bizzy counted 137,835 new registrations between 29 October 2025 and 29 October 2026: 77,081 sole proprietorships, 41,166 BVs, 4,630 vzws, 327 NVs and 14,631 other legal forms. 571 of them belong to an existing company with 10 or more employees.

In which months are most companies founded?

In the first month of each quarter: October, January, April and July. According to Bizzy, those four months together accounted for 46% of registrations from October 2025 to September 2026 inclusive. On 1 April 2026 alone, 7,050 enterprises were registered, 43% of the whole of April.

How quickly does a new Belgian company become visible?

About two working days. Newly founded legal entities are published in the annexes to the Belgian Official Gazette, and in the cohorts we sampled, the gap between incorporation and publication was two working days every time. Sole proprietorships do not appear in the Official Gazette.

Can I search the Crossroads Bank for companies founded last month?

No. Public Search has no start date filter on any of its six forms. It does show the start date of an enterprise you look up, but it cannot produce a list of companies by date of registration.

Can I use the Crossroads Bank's open data for a prospect list?

The data is free and updated daily, but it comes with a licence that limits use to the purpose you state when you sign up and prohibits personal data for direct marketing, explicitly including data on sole proprietorships. The licence text does not settle whether data on legal entities falls outside that restriction. Get legal advice before you build on it.

Why do different sources give different numbers of new companies?

Because they count different events. Bizzy counts registrations in the Crossroads Bank by founding date. Statbel's annual series compares VAT status on 31 December with that of the previous year, so an entity that never becomes liable for VAT stays invisible. That is how Statbel arrived at 113,289 VAT-registered start-ups in 2024.

Sources

• Bizzy: new registrations by founding date in the CBE, by legal form and by month (accessed on 29 October 2026)

• Bizzy: sample of 40 register files of legal entities founded in late August and early September 2026, and measured publication delay in the Belgian Official Gazette (September 2026)

• Belgian Official Gazette, legal entities annex

• FPS Economy, CBE Public Search

• FPS Economy, CBE Open Data and the associated licence terms

• Statbel, annual evolution of VAT-registered enterprises

• UNIZO, Starters in je buurt

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.