The RCS extract: what it costs, how to order it, and the filings behind it

An electronic extract from the Luxembourg trade register costs €10.43 excluding VAT, ordered from Luxembourg Business Registers; the version carrying a qualified electronic signature costs €15.43 and a paper copy €21.43.

The extract (extrait RCS) is the document that proves your company exists, shows who can sign for it, and states its registered office. Keeping it true is a filing discipline rather than a paperwork one: a corporate change has to reach the register within 1 month.

Those three extract tariffs were read against the Legilux text amending Annexe J in August 2026. Note that the RCS tariffs set by grand-ducal regulation are stated exclusive of VAT and are subject to VAT at 17%, so the amount you actually pay for an extract is a little above the published figure. The two other fee ranges further down this page come from guichet rather than from that tariff schedule, and are quoted here as guichet states them.

What an extract costs, and which version to order

An extract is sold rather than granted: it is bought from the register's public catalogue of already-published documents, so the buyer is not being checked for a connection to the company. That is exactly why the document works as proof to third parties. Three versions exist, and they differ in how the recipient can verify them, not in what they say:

Unless the requester has specified otherwise, the plain electronic version is the one to buy. The signed version exists for recipients who validate the signature itself rather than the look of the page — a foreign notary or a public authority may ask for it by name, and when one does, no amount of explaining substitutes. Ask the requester which one they need before paying for the wrong one twice.

How to order one

Ordering is a purchase, not a filing, and that distinction decides how much friction you meet. Depositing a deed runs through the register's authenticated filing route; buying a document that has already been published does not — which is why a bank's compliance desk or an opposing lawyer can pull your entry without telling you.

1. Find the entity on lbr.lu by registered name or, better, by RCS number. Trading names sit close together here, and the number is the only unambiguous handle.
2. Pick the version the requester asked for, not the one that looks most official, and pay the tariff for that version.
3. Take delivery. The electronic versions come back as a file you download; a paper copy has to be produced and posted, which is the version that misses same-week deadlines.
4. Read the date on its face and check the entries beneath against reality. If a change is in flight, you have just bought the old position.

What the register shows, and what it does not

Registration puts your company's identity on public record: name, legal form, registered office, the managers and how they bind the company, and the corporate purpose. The articles of association sit alongside, and so do the annual accounts, year after year. Because every filing is published in the electronic gazette RESA, the register is a history rather than a snapshot — anyone can reconstruct what changed and when.

The audience is wider than the document's dry surface suggests: bank compliance desks at onboarding and again at periodic review, enterprise clients before signing, suppliers extending credit, landlords, funding bodies checking an aid application, and litigation opponents, first thing. A stale entry is not an administrative loose end. It is a counterparty reading a document that contradicts what you told them.

What the RCS does not show is beneficial ownership. That lives in the separate RBE register, with its own access rules and its own deadline, and the two have to stay consistent because an inconsistency between them is visible to any reader entitled to see both.

Every change starts a filing clock

Corporate events trigger register filings, and the deadline runs from the act, not from the moment someone remembers. Article 15(1) of the law of 19 December 2002 sets the general limit at 1 month. Each event starts its own month, so sending a backlog to the register in one go does not cure the entries whose month has already run out.

Two rows deserve their arithmetic spelled out. The accounts clock has two legs: the general meeting approves within 6 months of the financial year-end, and the filing follows within 1 month of approval, which is why guichet states the outer limit as 7 months after year-end.

Approving late does not buy time; it burns the second leg. And the RBE month runs from the moment the entity knew or should have known of the event — a share transfer signed in March is not a July problem because that is when the file resurfaced.

On the manager row, note the scope: extracts of deeds relating to the appointment and termination of office of directors, managers or administrators must be filed. Signing power is what the extract is usually being read for, so a departure left unfiled contradicts you in the one place the reader is looking.

The mechanics are quick — filings are made electronically, and the deed is published in RESA on the day of filing, or on a fixed date chosen by the filer when creating the filing request, within a limit of 15 days after filing. It is also why keeping a spare extract on file buys nothing: an extract is only as current as the last filing that published. File first, then order.

The real cost of a late filing is not the fee

A missed deposit reads like an invoice problem — file late, pay a little more — and that framing is what makes the real exposure easy to miss. Register discipline feeds the professional-integrity test behind the business permit.

Article 6 of the law of 2 September 2011 lists the acts that defeat that integrity, and one of them is failing, on at least two occasions during the last three financial years, to meet the filing and publication obligations under the Trade and Companies Register law. Non-registration in the beneficial-ownership register, once it has persisted for 6 months, is another of the disqualifying acts guichet lists.

Two features of that test make it easy to underestimate. First, it does not bind only the person who signs the filings: the requirement covers the manager of the business in whose name the permit will be issued; and, where the business is operated as a company, also the person holding the majority of the shares and anyone who can exert a significant influence on the management or administration of the business.

Second, it follows the person rather than the company, so a dormant vehicle nobody bothered to file for can surface years later inside an unrelated permit application.

The register also sits on the permit's critical path: the articles of association must be registered with the Trade and Companies Register before the permit is definitively granted. The permit file and the register file therefore wait on each other, and a name or address changed halfway through restarts paperwork on both sides.

Where the RCS number has to appear

Once you have a number, it is not just for the extract. For a Sàrl, the company's documents must state the company name, the words 'société à responsabilité limitée', the registered office, the RCS registration number and the capacity of the signatory of the document (the share capital mention is no longer obligatory). In practice that means letterhead, invoices, contracts and the website footer.

The two elements easiest to lose are the registration number and the signatory's capacity: a template carries the name and the legal form because they are part of the brand, while those two have to be typed in by whoever built it.

The parenthetical matters too, because the share capital used to be compulsory in that list, and a template written to the older rule still prints it. Showing it is harmless in itself, but a footer built to a superseded list is a sign the rest of it has not been checked against the current one either. A simplified company carries an extra rule: the name must appear on all company documents followed by the mention SARL-S.

Common questions

These arrive when someone outside the company asks for the document: a bank at onboarding, a client's legal team before signature, a funding body checking an application. The request is not always phrased in the register's vocabulary, which is where time goes — buying the wrong version, or buying the right one before the filing that would have made it true. The three answers below decide whether the document you hand over says what you think it says.

How recent does an extract have to be?

There is no statutory expiry on the document. The recency window is set by whoever asked, so read the request rather than assume one. What matters more is that no filing has published since: an extract stops being true the moment the register moves, however fresh its date looks.

Can someone else order an extract of my company?

Yes. The RCS is a public register and any person can obtain an extract of any registered entity. What you control is not who reads the entry but what the entry says.

Does a name-availability certificate reserve my company name?

No. A document that arrives dated, downloadable and headed with your chosen name reads like a reservation, which is what makes this one so easy to get wrong. The check is made by submitting an electronic request for a certificate of name availability to Luxembourg Business Registers before incorporating, and it attests whether the requested name or names are available compared with the names of persons already registered with the RCS.

The certificate itself is valid from the moment it is issued until the name is entered in the RCS — but it does not reserve the name: any available name may be taken by the first person who requests it when registering with the RCS. It costs €4.75–10 depending on the version and stays downloadable for 20 days, per guichet. Treat it as evidence you checked, not as a claim staked.

What does the registration filing itself cost?

The initial registration fee runs €10–106 depending on the legal form. Later filings are priced per act under the same grand-ducal tariff, so the price of a statutory amendment is not the price of a registration, and a tariff quoted for one legal form is not the tariff for another — which is what makes a second-hand figure unreliable even when it was right where it was written.

The portal prices your specific filing before you confirm it, and that is the figure to act on.

Keeping the register current

None of the filings above is hard on its own. What makes them slip is that each one is the tail end of something more interesting — a hire, a move, a new shareholder — while the register's clock starts at the act rather than at the moment the file comes back to the top of the pile. So the habit that works is unglamorous, and it is a sequence attached to the event rather than a checklist you revisit:

1. Treat the filing as part of the event. The deed is not finished when it is signed; it is finished when it is filed, inside the 1-month window — and file before ordering the extract anyone asked you for.
2. Reconcile the RCS and the RBE after every change of manager or shareholder. The deadlines are the same length and run from different trigger points, which is how they drift apart.
3. Put the approval date in the calendar, not the filing date. The 6-month approval leg is the one that quietly consumes the filing month.
4. Audit the footer once a year against the mentions the law requires, since the required list has changed and a template does not update itself.

None of this is complicated work. It runs on the register's clock rather than yours, and that clock keeps running whether or not the file is open on anyone's desk.