How many companies are there in Europe? Active enterprises by country

The number: 33,311,582 active enterprises in the EU

There were 33,311,582 active enterprises in the European Union in 2023. That is Eurostat's count for the 27 member states in its business demography table, covering industry, construction and market services, NACE sections B to S without public administration and membership organisations. The 2022 figure was 32,591,380, so the population grew by 720,202 in a year. Eurostat's preliminary figure for 2024 is 34 million.

The count is harmonised: every member state reports under the same definition of an enterprise, which is why the table below is the right one for comparing countries. It is also why the numbers are lower than what any national register shows. A register counts legal units; Eurostat counts enterprises that were active in the reference year, and a group of legal units can form one enterprise.

Four countries hold just over half of the total. France with 5,382,659, Italy with 4,616,886, Spain with 3,503,285 and Germany with 3,190,747 add up to 16,693,577 enterprises, 50.1 per cent of the EU population. Poland is fifth with 2,746,431 and the Netherlands sixth with 2,303,028.

By country: every member state, 2023

The table lists every EU member state plus the EFTA and candidate countries Eurostat publishes, ordered by the 2023 count. Where we have written a page about a country's business population or its outbound market, the country name links to it.

Two countries we work in are missing from the Eurostat table: Switzerland and the United Kingdom report business demography outside this dataset. Our pages on lead generation in Switzerland and lead generation in the UK cover those markets from their national sources.

One row moves against the trend. Hungary fell from 976,964 to 901,708 enterprises between 2022 and 2023, a drop of 75,256, while every other member state grew. The table does not say why, and a change in how Hungary's statistical office classifies active units is as plausible as a real contraction. Treat the Hungarian figure with that in mind.

Why national registers count more

Ask a national statistics office how many companies it has and you get a bigger number than Eurostat's. Germany is the clearest case. Destatis's Unternehmensregister lists 3,543,865 legal units for 2024: every unit with a VAT return or employees and a seat in Germany, whether a sole trader, a GmbH or a partnership. Eurostat's harmonised count for 2023 is 3,190,747. The 353,118 gap is a difference of definition, and both numbers are correct for the question they answer. We set them side by side, with the size classes and the 17 economic sections, in Wie viele Unternehmen gibt es in Deutschland?.

Poland shows the gap at its widest. The REGON register held 5,532,543 entities on 30 September 2026, of which 863,860 had suspended activity and 3,902,321 were natural persons running a business. Eurostat counts 2,746,431 active enterprises for 2023. Our own Polish database, built from the KRS and CEIDG registers and limited to records with an active status, holds 734,565 companies. Three numbers, three questions: how many entries exist, how many enterprises traded, how many companies can an outbound campaign reach. The Polish breakdown by region, section and legal form is in Ile jest firm w Polsce?.

Lithuania sits in between. Eurostat counts 357,723 active enterprises for 2023, up from 329,361 in 2022, and our Lithuanian database holds 224,096 active companies after the same status filter. For any country, the register is the ceiling, Eurostat is the comparable population, and a verified list is the market you can write to.

Births and deaths: where the population moves

Eurostat's preliminary 2024 figures put the EU birth rate at 10.4 per cent of active enterprises and the death rate at 9.2 per cent, against a final 2023 death rate of 8.1 per cent. Roughly one enterprise in ten is less than a year old at any point, and almost as many close each year. A list built two years ago has lost a measurable share of its rows to closures and gained nothing from the new entrants.

The rates vary widely by country. Lithuania reported a 2024 birth rate of 17.5 per cent and a preliminary death rate of 15.6 per cent, the fastest churn among the member states Eurostat highlights, which matches the 28,362 net increase between 2022 and 2023 in the table above. Estonia's preliminary death rate was 29.2 per cent, and Ireland's 16.9 per cent. Germany, Italy and Denmark reported birth rates under 8 per cent. Portugal's was 16.1 per cent and Malta's slightly over 14 per cent.

For targeting, the birth rate is the more useful of the two. New enterprises have no supplier relationships yet, and in most registers the registration date is a public field, so a list of companies registered in the last twelve months costs little to build. In Poland, 175,852 of the 734,565 companies in our database were registered in the last three full years, close to a quarter of the active register.

From a national count to a target list

None of the numbers on this page is a market. They are the ceiling from which a target list is cut in three passes: size class, sector, region. Germany's 3,543,865 legal units shrink to 18,632 once you require 250 or more employees, and to 209,815 once you require manufacturing. The intersection of the two is a few thousand plants, and that is a list an outbound campaign can work through in a quarter.

The second cut is reachability. A company with no website, no named contact and no verifiable email address counts in every register and in no campaign. In our Polish database only 161,141 of 734,565 companies, 22 per cent, have a domain on file. Any prospecting workflow that starts from a company website silently discards the rest, which is why we build from the register first and add the contact second. The sources available for that, country by country, are listed in B2B data sources in Europe.

The third cut is law. The GDPR applies across the table above once a named person is in the record, but the rule for sending is national: Germany's UWG requires prior express consent for advertising email, Poland's PKE ties unsolicited commercial information to consent, and Lithuania has allowed email and calls to legal persons without prior consent since April 2026, with a mandatory opt-out. Our European lead generation page carries the per-country summary, and if you would rather compare providers than build this yourself, see the best B2B lead generation agencies in Europe.

Method and sources

The country table was pulled on 21 October 2026 from Eurostat's dissemination API, dataset bd_size (business demography by size class and NACE Rev. 2 activity), last updated by Eurostat on 16 October 2026, with the filters indicator ENT_NR (enterprises, number), size class total, age total, activity B to S excluding O and S94, reference years 2022 and 2023. The 2024 preliminary figures and the birth and death rates come from Eurostat's Statistics Explained article "Business demography statistics", read the same day.

The German register total is from Destatis, Statistisches Unternehmensregister, reporting year 2024, published 1 December 2025. The Polish register figures are from the GUS monthly report on REGON entities for September 2026, published 12 October 2026. The Ripe Leads database counts are from our own August 2026 extracts and are documented, with their gaps, in Inside a 734,565-company Polish business database and Inside a 224,096-company Lithuanian business database.

Eurostat revises business demography figures as member states submit final data, so a reader checking the table a year from now should expect small changes to the 2023 column and a full 2024 column. We will update this page when the 2024 data are final.