A Luxembourg company needs its registered office at an address in Luxembourg, and the law is specific about where that address sits: the domicile of any commercial company is at the company's principal establishment. The published test is short: a company's registered office must be capable of being clearly determined.
Domiciliation with a licensed third party is a genuine, regulated route. It is also narrower than it looks from outside, because it is written for companies whose activity does not require premises of their own. Everything below is that sentence in detail, checked against guichet.public.lu and legilux in August 2026.
What the address has to do
Three institutions read the same address for three different reasons, and an address that satisfies one of them can still fail the next. The register records it, the ministry tests what stands behind it wherever a permit applies, and the bank checks it against everything else in the onboarding file.
Mail and reachability. The registered office is where official correspondence lands: tax office, social security, register, ministry. A forwarding instruction only describes what happens to an envelope after it arrives.
The business permit. The permit rests on five conditions: professional integrity, professional qualification in line with the planned activity, establishment in Luxembourg, effective and permanent management of the business by the permit holder, and compliance with tax and business obligations. Establishment in Luxembourg is one of them, and the law of 2 September 2011 fills it in.
The business needs an appropriate physical installation, adapted to the nature and the scale of the activities carried on. The test is proportionality rather than square metres: a consultancy does not need a warehouse, a food business cannot run from a desk. The same law attaches a person to the place: the manager must ensure day-to-day management of the business effectively and permanently, through a physical presence at the establishment.
The bank. Account opening runs on the bank's own file rather than the ministry's. An address that carries a permit file can still leave an onboarding open.
Domiciliation: legal, regulated, and narrower than it looks
Domiciliation sits under the amended law of 31 May 1999 governing the domiciliation of companies, and it is not a service anyone may sell. The activity is reserved by law to credit institutions, other financial-sector and insurance-sector professionals, list I lawyers, list IV European lawyers, réviseurs d'entreprises, réviseurs d'entreprises agréés and experts-comptables.
The rule itself, qualifier included: a company without its own premises may, under certain conditions, be domiciled with a third party and fix its registered office there — but guichet states this suits only companies whose activity does not require their own premises, and expressly not a commercial company which the law requires to have a physical establishment in Luxembourg; to count as a stable establishment a company must occupy real premises of its own.
The second half is the half that gets lost. The opening reads like an open door; the qualifier after it decides whether that door is open to your company at all. A holding vehicle, or an administrative structure whose work happens in files and decisions, is the case the text describes. A commercial company that the law expects to have a physical establishment is not, and no agreement stands in for premises the activity itself requires.
So the scope question belongs in the conversation before anything is signed. The agent is a member of a regulated profession acting under the 1999 law, and the arrangement has to hold on their side of the file as well as yours.
The four routes, side by side
Compare them by the document each one leaves behind: what it demonstrates, and where it stops demonstrating anything. A permit file, a register filing and a bank onboarding all have to work with that piece of paper. Read the last column first. Every route below works for some activities and fails for others, and the failure point comes from the activity rather than the price.
| Route | What you sign | What the file shows | Where it runs out |
|---|---|---|---|
| Commercial lease | A lease in the company's name | Premises the company controls, with a rent trail | Fixed commitment; unavoidable once the activity needs space |
| Coworking, named workstation | A membership with a real right to work there | Somewhere the business can genuinely operate from | A mail plan under a coworking brand evidences mail handling only |
| Domiciliation, licensed agent | An agreement under the 1999 law | A regulated third party hosting the office | Scoped to activities needing no premises of their own |
| Your Luxembourg home | Nothing new; the lease or co-ownership rules govern | An address the founder already occupies | Professional use must be allowed by the lease and building rules |
There are no prices in that table, deliberately. Domiciliation and coworking rates are set by private providers rather than by a published tariff, so a figure here would be one quote dressed as a rule.
The eligibility rule above is published, and it is the fastest test to run against any offer: a provider outside those reserved professions is not selling domiciliation, whatever the page calls it, because the law reserves the activity and not the wording. PO boxes, virtual addresses that only forward mail, and addresses abroad fail on every route.
Central administration, and the number nobody can give you
Behind the registered office sits a broader idea, central administration: that a Luxembourg company is actually administered from Luxembourg, where managers decide and where the books and the bank mandates live.
Founders reasonably want a threshold: how far may the manager live, how many meetings on the ground. We could not verify any official page publishing a distance, a day count or a numeric substance test, so this article prints none — a kilometre figure quoted elsewhere is someone's practice written up as a rule.
The published requirement is narrower. Alongside the physical presence above, the permit law wants a real link between manager and business: the manager must be the owner of the business where the activity is carried on in a personal name, or entered in the Trade and Companies Register as the company's mandataire where it is a company.
Where address files stall
Sequencing makes the address urgent earlier than it looks, because the permit file and the register interlock: the articles of association must be registered with the Trade and Companies Register before the permit is definitively granted. The address goes into the register before the permit reaches its last step, so an address you cannot yet evidence stalls something two removes down the chain.
The permit application, the RCS filing and the bank file each state an address, and each institution reads only its own copy. Three bodies pausing once each adds weeks.
On timing, the ministry acknowledges receipt of the permit file within 15 days and then has 3 months to decide, and the absence of a ministerial reply before the end of the 3-month period counts as a tacit authorisation. That window is the ministry's own clock and buys you no time for gathering documents.
Founders leave the address until last for a structural reason rather than a careless one: it is the only element of the file that is not a form. Capital, identity documents and the deed sit on a portal or with the notary, and each of them prompts you. A lease or a domiciliation agreement is a negotiation on someone else's timetable.
Moving the registered office later
Companies outgrow addresses, and moving is a filing rather than a re-founding. The office sits in the articles and in the register, so a transfer is two acts: the decision that amends the articles, and the filing that updates the record. Which body takes the first depends on what your own articles say.
On the register side, filings are made electronically, and a change must be filed within 1 month under article 15 of the law of 19 December 2002. Publication follows: 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.
The permit is issued against an establishment, and guichet runs initial applications and modifications through the same procedure. The awkward case is not the move but the repair: an address that never met the test is not cured by a later transfer.
Common questions
These arrive once the basic rule lands. Each is answered from what is actually published, including where the published rule decides less than the question assumes.
Can two companies use the same address?
Nothing published turns on exclusivity. The tests are whether the office is determinable and, where a permit applies, whether the installation is adapted to the nature and scale of the activities carried on there. Several companies at a licensed agent's premises is ordinary. Several unrelated operating businesses claiming adapted premises at one small address is not.
Can my accountant's office be my registered office?
Only through the domiciliation route, and only where that professional falls in the reserved categories. An expert-comptable does; a friend with a spare office does not. It is an agreement under the 1999 law, and the scope limit above applies as it would with any other agent.
Does the commune change the tax bill?
The municipal layer varies, so the choice is not tax-neutral. Municipal business tax is a 3% base rate multiplied by the commune's coefficient, which runs generally between 200% and 400%; Luxembourg City applies 225%, producing 6.75%. The commune still has to follow a real operating story, so the tax question sits downstream of the establishment question.
Is a virtual address or PO box enough?
No. The office must be capable of being clearly determined, and the company's domicile is at its principal establishment; a service whose entire substance is redirecting post satisfies neither. Where a permit applies, the physical installation requirement settles it.
Before you commit to an address
Address problems are usually contract problems, and they surface months later — at a filing, a permit decision or a bank onboarding — when the document that was signed turns out not to say what the file needs it to say.
By then the terms are fixed and the only remedy is a second arrangement. Run the three checks below while the arrangement is still negotiable: before a lease is countersigned, before an agreement is dated, and before the same address is written into four separate files that will each be read on its own.
- Check whose name the contract is in: a lease in a founder's personal name evidences the founder's arrangement, and has to be transferable to the company at incorporation.
- Check the use clause. A residential lease or a building's co-ownership rules may restrict professional use, and that restriction outranks your intention.
- Write the same address, in the same form, into the articles, the RCS filing, the business permit file and the bank file, before any of them goes in.