How to Download Your GST Certificate (REG-06)

The GST registration certificate — Form GST REG-06 — is only downloadable by the registered person themselves, from their own logged-in account. There is no portal page that lets you pull a counterparty's certificate, and no public archive of issued certificates. If you need to confirm a supplier's registration, the certificate you can get is theirs to share, not yours to retrieve, and once it is a file sitting in your inbox it stops being current the moment anything about their registration changes. This post covers how to download your own certificate, what REG-06 actually contains, and what to check instead of a PDF when you are verifying someone else.

Where to download it on the portal

Log in to gst.gov.in with your own username and password, then go to Services, then User Services, then View/Download Certificates. The page lists every certificate issued against your registration, including amended versions, and a Download link produces the PDF.

This works only for the account you are logged in as. There is no separate lookup where you type in a GSTIN that is not yours and get its certificate back — the portal treats the certificate as belonging to the registered person, not as a public document. If you are trying to confirm someone else's registration rather than download your own, see how to check a fake GST number for the checks that do work without their login.

What Form REG-06 actually contains

REG-06 is a standard format, so every certificate carries the same fields regardless of business type:

• GSTIN
• Legal name and, where registered, trade name
• Constitution of business — proprietorship, partnership, company, and so on
• Address of the principal place of business
• Date from which registration is effective (the date of liability)
• Type of registration, and where relevant a validity period for a casual or non-resident taxable person, who is registered for a fixed window rather than indefinitely
• Annexure A — additional places of business, if any are registered
• Annexure B — details of partners or directors named on the registration

The GSTIN format explained post breaks down what the digits of the GSTIN itself encode, separately from what the certificate document contains.

The display requirement most businesses miss

Registered persons are generally required to display the certificate of registration at their principal place of business, and a copy of it at every additional place of business, and to display the GSTIN on the name board at the entrance of each such place. This obligation sits under the CGST Rules; confirm the exact rule number and current wording on cbic-gst.gov.in rather than relying on a summary, since the specifics matter for a compliance check.

Amended certificates and cancelled registrations

A core-field amendment — legal name, principal place of business, or addition or removal of partners and directors — goes through an approval process, and once approved the portal issues a fresh REG-06 reflecting the new details. The View/Download Certificates page keeps prior versions available, so you can distinguish the current certificate from earlier ones if you are checking history.

For a registration that has since been cancelled, the certificate typically remains visible in the portal's history alongside the cancellation order, but it describes a registration that is no longer active. Anyone relying on that certificate should read it alongside the current status and cancellation date, not on its own — see GST cancellation and revocation for how cancellation and revocation work and what a cancelled GSTIN can and cannot still do.

Why a supplier's PDF is not enough on its own

A PDF is an editable file format. Fields on a certificate — the legal name, the address, even the GSTIN itself — can be altered before the document reaches you, and nothing about a PDF viewer will flag that. Separately from forgery, the certificate is a snapshot as of the date it was issued or last amended: it says nothing about whether the registration is still active, whether the address has since changed, or whether the supplier has actually been filing returns.

Both problems have the same fix. Treat the certificate as a claim, then verify the claim against the live GSTIN record rather than the document.

What to check on the live record instead

Whether you check manually on the portal or through an API, the same four fields matter most for onboarding or payment decisions:

1. Legal name. Should match the certificate and, ideally, the name on invoices and bank details exactly.
2. Address. Should match the principal place of business on the certificate, unless an amendment has since moved it — in which case the live record, not the certificate, is correct.
3. Status. Active, cancelled or suspended. This is the field a certificate cannot show you at all, because it does not exist on the document.
4. Filing history. Whether GSTR returns are being filed on schedule. A supplier who is registered but not filing is a real input tax credit risk even though their certificate looks fine.

Our GST verification API returns the current registration details and per-period GSTR filing history in one API call, so vendor onboarding checks do not depend on a document someone else controls. See GST verification for vendor onboarding for how that fits into an onboarding workflow, and the GSTIN verification API or the free GST number search tool to check a single GSTIN right now.

Troubleshooting: missing download, name mismatch

The download option is missing or greyed out. This usually means the registration is still under processing and the certificate has not been generated yet, or the account is a legacy registration migrated from the pre-GST regime where certificate issuance can lag. Check the application status under Services first; if the ARN shows approved but no certificate appears, that is worth raising with the helpdesk rather than assuming the download is broken.

The name on the certificate doesn't match what I expected. If a legal name amendment was filed and approved, the certificate updates to the new name and the old one is superseded — check the View/Download Certificates page for a more recent version before assuming an error. If no amendment was filed and the name still looks wrong, that is a reason to query the live GSTIN record and compare, per the checklist above, rather than trust either document blindly.

For the broader question of whether any of this information should be publicly checkable in the first place, see is a GST number public information, and for a taxpayer holding more than one registration under the same PAN, see multiple GST registrations under the same PAN. If you are setting up registration from scratch, start with the GST registration process online.

Frequently asked questions