Is a business registration the same as a company founding?

No. Every trade is registered, including secondary activities, relocations into the city and takeovers. The figure describes movement in the trade register, not the number of new companies.

What does a filed insolvency mean?

Filed insolvency petitions are counted, not opened or completed proceedings. That makes the figure an early indicator and not a statistic about outcomes of proceedings.

Why do the two endpoints carry different years?

Because business notifications are published earlier than the insolvency statistic. Every response carries its own reference year so that different periods are not compared by accident.

Are the figures available per industry?

No, this endpoint returns the totals per district and year. The underlying table does not provide a breakdown by economic sector at this resolution.

Business and insolvency API for German cities

Name: Business notifications and insolvencies per German city
Creator: InfraNode
License: https://www.govdata.de/dl-de/by-2-0

Business registrations, deregistrations and filed insolvencies show how the economy of a city is doing. This API returns those figures per city from the regional database Germany, key-free and each with the reference year behind it.

What data you get

One endpoint returns the number of business registrations, the number of deregistrations, the balance of both and the reference year. A second endpoint returns filed insolvencies, split into companies and other debtors, also with a reference year. The reference years of the two endpoints can differ because the statistics are published at a different pace.

Business registrations
Business deregistrations
Balance of registrations and deregistrations
Reference year of the business notifications
Filed corporate insolvencies
Filed insolvencies of other debtors
Reference year of the insolvencies

Source: German federal and state statistical offices, regional database Germany. License: DL-DE/BY 2.0. Source, license URL and timestamp are included in every API response in the meta and attribution block.

How to fetch it

A simple GET request, no key and no sign-up:

curl https://infranode.dev/api/v1/cities/koeln/business-registrations

For another city, just put the slug from the cities list into the path.

No key, no sign-up, free.

Open quickstart Endpoint reference

Covered cities

All cities in the register. Both statistics are published per district and district-free city: if a city is not a district of its own, the value applies to the surrounding district. The balance is the difference between registrations and deregistrations in that reference year, not a stock figure.

Available for all 84 covered cities. The exact per-city status is on the coverage and status page, the full list of cities on the cities overview.

Straight to the largest covered cities: Berlin , Hamburg , München , Köln , Frankfurt am Main , Stuttgart , Düsseldorf , Leipzig , Dortmund , Essen .

Endpoint reference

All parameters, fields and response examples are in the API reference for this endpoint. InfraNode is also available as an MCP server for AI assistants.

Frequently asked questions

Is a business registration the same as a company founding?: No. Every trade is registered, including secondary activities, relocations into the city and takeovers. The figure describes movement in the trade register, not the number of new companies.
What does a filed insolvency mean?: Filed insolvency petitions are counted, not opened or completed proceedings. That makes the figure an early indicator and not a statistic about outcomes of proceedings.
Why do the two endpoints carry different years?: Because business notifications are published earlier than the insolvency statistic. Every response carries its own reference year so that different periods are not compared by accident.
Are the figures available per industry?: No, this endpoint returns the totals per district and year. The underlying table does not provide a breakdown by economic sector at this resolution.