GST search
A GST search looks up a business’s GST registration against government records. Enter a 15-character GSTIN and you get the legal name, trade name, current status, registered addresses and recent return filing history for that registration — free, in a few seconds, with no account.
No signup, no card. Try it on the sample GSTIN 27AAACR5055K1Z7.
Three ways to search, and how well each one works
What you can search by depends entirely on what identifier you already hold. The three routes are not equally reliable, and being clear about that saves a lot of wasted effort.
Search by GSTIN
You have the 15-character number and want to know who it belongs to.
The most reliable route by far. One number, one registration, one answer — legal name, status, jurisdiction and filing history.
Run a free GSTIN searchSearch by PAN
You have the entity’s 10-character PAN but not its GST number.
Positions 3–12 of every GSTIN are the holder’s PAN, so a PAN search returns every GSTIN issued against it — one row per state.
How PAN search worksSearch by business name
You only have a company or trade name.
The hardest case, and the one most guides overpromise on. There is no public name-to-GSTIN directory — name search is a narrowing step, never a confirmed answer.
What actually works by nameWhat the GST portal’s own search does — and where it stops
The government portal at gst.gov.in offers Search by GSTIN/UIN, Search by PAN, Search Composition Taxpayer and Search Temporary ID. It is authoritative and free, and for checking one number it is perfectly adequate. The friction starts the moment you have more than one to check.
A captcha on every single search
Each lookup on gst.gov.in needs a fresh captcha. Checking twenty vendors means solving twenty captchas by hand.
Sessions that time out mid-task
The Search Taxpayer session expires while you work, and you start over — painful when you are reconciling a supplier list.
No bulk search, no CSV upload
The portal is built for one GSTIN at a time. There is no way to paste in 500 numbers and get 500 rows back.
No public API behind it
The portal’s own search has no open API. Programmatic access to registration data goes through a verification API instead.
No name directory for regular taxpayers
Search by name exists only for composition taxpayers, filtered by state. Regular taxpayers cannot be browsed by name at all.
Nothing you can export
Results render as a web page. Getting them into a spreadsheet or your ERP means copying fields across by hand.
What a GST search result actually tells you
A result is more than a yes/no. Each field answers a different question about the business, and the ones people skip are usually the ones that matter for a payment decision.
| Field | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Legal name and trade name | Who the registration actually belongs to. The trade name on an invoice often differs from the legal name on the registration — both should be recognisable to you. |
| GSTIN status | Active, Cancelled, Suspended or Provisional. This is the field that decides whether you should be transacting at all. |
| Registration date | When the GSTIN was issued. A registration created days before a large first invoice deserves a second look. |
| Constitution and taxpayer type | Proprietorship, partnership, private limited, and whether the taxpayer is Regular, Composition, Casual or an Input Service Distributor. |
| Principal and additional places of business | The registered addresses. Compare against the address printed on the invoice or quoted in the contract. |
| Centre and state jurisdiction | The range and division administering the registration — occasionally needed when raising a query or a complaint. |
| GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B filing history | Whether returns are being filed, and how late. A supplier who has stopped filing puts your input tax credit at risk. |
| E-invoicing enablement | Whether the taxpayer is flagged as enabled for e-invoicing, which determines whether their B2B invoice needs an IRN to be valid. |
When manual search stops being the answer
A few searches a week is a browser tab. A vendor master of 4,000 GSTINs re-checked every quarter, or a
status check inside a signup flow, is not — that is where a
GSTIN verification API
takes over. One GET
request per GSTIN returns the same registration, filing and e-invoicing data as structured JSON, with no
captcha and no session to keep alive.
It is pay-as-you-go: 20 free credits when you verify your email, then ₹0.50 per verification, dropping to ₹0.40 past 2,500 credits. No subscription, no minimum. See the GST API overview, the endpoint documentation, or the bulk GSTIN verification guide if you are working from a spreadsheet today.
GST search — common questions
Search a GST number right now
Live data from the government GST system — business name, status, addresses and filing history. Free searches every day, no account needed.