ACRA publishes seven datasets covering every business entity on Singapore’s register, free, in machine-readable form, on Data.gov.sg. Over 1.5 million records of active and inactive entities, refreshed monthly, downloadable in bulk or reachable by API. No login, no payment, no purpose declaration.
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That is a genuinely useful public asset, and almost nobody outside the developer community knows it exists. Business owners still pay for information they could have pulled for nothing, and researchers still scrape websites for data that is sitting in a clean file.
It is also easy to misuse. The open datasets are a snapshot of registry-level facts, not a substitute for a Business Profile, and they will not tell you who owns a company. Here is the honest version of what you get.
What “open data” means in this context
ACRA is the national business registry. Every company, sole proprietorship, partnership, limited partnership, limited liability partnership, public accounting firm and variable capital company that operates lawfully in Singapore has a record in it. Much of that record is, by statute, public information: the whole point of a register is that third parties can rely on it.
The Open Data initiative takes the public layer of that register, strips it of anything that is not meant to be broadcast, and republishes it as structured files on Data.gov.sg under Singapore’s whole-of-government open data programme. You are not querying ACRA’s live system. You are downloading a periodic extract of it.
Two consequences follow immediately, and they matter more than anything else in this article:
- The data is a monthly snapshot, not a live feed. A company incorporated yesterday will not appear until the next refresh. A company struck off last week will still look alive.
- It is entity-level, not ownership-level. Shareholders, share capital, charges and registrable controllers are not in these files.
What is actually in the seven datasets
The datasets are organised by subject rather than by entity type, so a single company’s information is spread across several files and joined on its Unique Entity Number.
| Dataset | What you get from it | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
| Basic entity information | Entity name, UEN, date of incorporation or registration, status, entity type | The backbone file. Everything else joins to this on UEN |
| Registered office address | The address registered with ACRA | Geographic mapping, catchment analysis, address clustering |
| Accounts information | Accounts due date and annual return due date | Compliance calendars, identifying entities approaching a filing deadline |
| Singapore Standard Industrial Classification | Primary and secondary business activity codes | Sector sizing, competitor counts, industry segmentation |
| Position holders | Number of officers | A crude proxy for governance complexity |
| Former names | Previous entity names | Tracing an entity that has rebranded, name-change history |
| Audit firms | Audit firm name and UEN | Audit market share analysis, checking who audits whom |
Read that table once more and notice what is missing. There are no shareholder names. There are no director names, only a count of officers. There are no financial figures. There is no charge register.
Why the omissions are deliberate
Personal data of officers and members sits behind a paid, logged transaction for a reason. Buying a Business Profile leaves a trail; bulk-downloading a file does not. Singapore’s approach is to make the shape of the economy freely inspectable while keeping individual-level personal data behind a transaction that can be audited.
If you need names, you buy the product. Our guide to Bizfile’s search functions before you sign anything covers where that line sits in practice, and paying ACRA on Bizfile covers what happens when the payment for a paid product fails halfway.
How to get the data
There are two routes, and the right one depends on whether you want the data once or continuously.
- Bulk download. Go to Data.gov.sg, search for the ACRA datasets by name, and download. You get a file you can open in a spreadsheet or load into a database. This is the right route for a one-off analysis, a market sizing exercise or a research paper.
- API. Data.gov.sg exposes the same datasets through a documented API, described in the Data.gov.sg developer guide. This is the right route if you are building something that needs to refresh itself: a screening tool, an internal CRM enrichment job, a compliance dashboard.
For the API route, budget for the boring part. You will need to handle pagination, schema drift when ACRA adjusts a field, and the fact that entity names contain characters that will break a naive CSV parser. Build the ingestion once, properly, and it will run for years.
The UEN is the only key you should trust
Join on UEN. Never join on entity name.
Singapore entity names are not unique across time, they change, and they are riddled with variations in punctuation, spacing and the treatment of “PTE. LTD.” versus “PTE LTD”. A name-based join will silently produce wrong matches, and you will not notice until someone senior asks a question you cannot answer. The Former names dataset exists precisely because names are unstable.
What you can genuinely do with this
Size a market properly. Filter the basic entity file to active entities, join to SSIC, and count. You now have the real population of registered businesses in your sector rather than an estimate from a trade association. If your SSIC understanding is shaky, start with choosing your SSIC code, and note that the code set itself moved recently, which we covered in the SSIC 2025 migration.
Screen a counterparty list quickly. If you have a list of 400 customers, enrich it against the basic entity dataset and you will find the ones whose status is no longer live, the ones that were registered three weeks before they signed with you, and the ones whose registered address is shared with forty other entities. None of that is proof of anything. All of it is worth a second look.
Check your own records. Run your client or supplier master file against the dataset. Mismatched UENs, stale names and wrong entity types show up in minutes. This is the cheapest data-hygiene exercise available to a Singapore business.
Find the audit market. The audit firm dataset is the only public source that lets you count how many entities a given audit firm signs off. It is a legitimate and under-used piece of market intelligence.
What goes wrong in practice
Three failure modes, in descending order of how often we see them.
Treating a monthly snapshot as current. Someone downloads the file in March, uses it in July, and concludes a company is active when it was struck off in May. If a decision turns on an entity’s current status, check the live record. The open dataset is for analysis, not for the moment before you sign. For live checking, Bizfile’s own search is the correct tool.
Assuming the officer count tells you about control. It does not. A company with one officer may have a sole shareholder or twelve. A company with six officers may be controlled entirely by one person through a chain of holding entities. Registrable controller information is not in the open data and is not publicly searchable at all.
Republishing the data without reading the terms. Open data comes with a licence. It is permissive, but it is not the absence of terms, and if you are building a commercial product on top of it you should read the Singapore Open Data Licence on Data.gov.sg before you ship. Firms in the regulated corporate services space have a further layer of obligations around the information they collect and hold, which we set out in the Corporate Service Providers Act 2024 compliance FAQ.
Frequently asked questions
Is ACRA’s open data really free?
Yes. The seven datasets are published on Data.gov.sg at no charge, with no account required for bulk download. Paid Bizfile products such as Business Profiles and certified extracts are separate and remain chargeable. The free datasets do not include officer names, shareholders or financial information.
How often is the data updated?
Monthly. ACRA refreshes the datasets on a monthly cycle, so any given file reflects the register as at the last refresh rather than today. For anything time-sensitive, such as confirming an entity is still live before a transaction, check the live record on Bizfile instead.
Can I find out who owns a company from the open datasets?
No. Shareholder details, director names and registrable controller information are not included. The datasets tell you the number of officers, not who they are. Ownership information requires a paid Business Profile, and controller information is not publicly available at all.
Do I need a licence or approval to use the data commercially?
You need to comply with the open data licence terms published on Data.gov.sg rather than obtain individual approval. The terms are permissive and contemplate commercial reuse, but read them before building a product on the data, particularly around attribution and warranty disclaimers.
Which dataset should I start with?
Basic entity information. It carries the UEN, name, status, entity type and registration date, and every other dataset joins to it on UEN. Download that one first, understand its structure, then add the others as your analysis actually needs them rather than pulling all seven at once.
When the free data is not the right answer
Open data is superb for understanding populations and terrible for answering questions about one specific company at one specific moment. That is not a criticism of ACRA. It is the nature of a monthly extract.
If you are about to sign a supply agreement, take security, accept a share transfer or admit a new partner, you need the live record and usually the paid product. If you are trying to understand a sector, a trend or your own data quality, the free files will do everything you need.
Raffles Corporate Services runs both sides of that line for clients every week: registry checks before a transaction, and the wider data work that tells you whether your own records match what ACRA holds. If your customer master file has never been reconciled against the register, that is usually a short exercise with an uncomfortable result.
You can reach us through Raffles Corporate Services, or read more on Singapore corporate secretarial practice at Singapore Secretary Services.
The Editorial Team, Raffles Corporate Services
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