MCA Master Data: The Complete 2026 Guide to Checking and Exporting Company Records

What MCA master data contains, how to read every field, what changed with the V3 portal, how to check a company in three minutes — and how to pull the same record for thousands of companies at once.

By the Algoura team · Updated 9 September 2026

MCA master data is the Ministry of Corporate Affairs' official, publicly available record of every company and LLP registered in India. It carries the entity's CIN or LLPIN, its current status, date of incorporation, registered office, authorised and paid-up capital, directors, and registered charges — and anyone can view it free on the MCA V3 portal at mca.gov.in, no login required.

That one record is the starting point for almost every serious decision made about an Indian company: whether to lend to it, onboard it, invest in it, sell to it, or sue it. This guide explains exactly what MCA master data contains, how to read each field, how the move to the V3 portal changed access, how to pull the record yourself in three minutes — and how to do it for thousands of companies at once when a single lookup no longer cuts it.

We wrote this from the inside. Building MCA Explorer meant mapping every field the registry exposes and returning it as clean, structured data, so the descriptions below reflect what the record actually holds — not a paraphrase of the portal's help text.

What is MCA master data?

Every company incorporated in India must register with the Registrar of Companies (ROC), a statutory office that sits under the Ministry of Corporate Affairs. The details submitted at incorporation — plus every statutory form filed afterwards — become that entity's master data: its official biography as recognised by the Government of India.

• It is authoritative. The data originates from filings made directly with the ROC, so it is the government's own view of the company, not a third-party estimate or a scraped directory.
• It is public and free. Basic master data can be viewed by anyone without a login or a fee, which makes it the natural first step in any Indian business-verification exercise.

One caveat worth stating plainly, because it trips people up: master data is only as current as the last filing the ROC has processed. A newly appointed director or a freshly satisfied charge appears once the relevant form is filed and taken on record — not the instant it happens in the real world. When you need certainty, read the record together with the filing dates attached to it.

What does MCA company master data contain?

When people search for mca company master data, this is the record they mean — the company-level snapshot the registry returns for a single CIN. Here is every core field and what it actually tells you.

Reading the status field correctly

Status is where most people misread the record. ACTIVE means the entity exists and is on the register — it does not certify that filings are up to date. STRIKE OFF means the ROC has removed the company from the register, usually for non-compliance. UNDER LIQUIDATION and DISSOLVED speak for themselves. AMALGAMATED means the company merged into another — follow the trail to the surviving entity. Treat status as a headline, then confirm it against the incorporation date, capital and charges before you act on it.

MCA director master data (and the DIN)

Alongside the company record sits the director master data, keyed to the Director Identification Number (DIN). Pull a DIN and you get the director's name, designation and date of appointment, their DIN status, and — critically — every other company they are or were associated with.

That last piece is what turns a flat company check into a network view. A single director's profile can reveal related entities, shared control across a group, or a pattern of appointments across companies that were later struck off. For due-diligence and fraud-screening teams, director master data is often more revealing than the company record itself.

MCA master data V3: what changed from V2

If you last used the MCA portal a few years ago, the experience has changed. MCA master data v3 refers to the record as it's now served on the upgraded MCA21 V3 portal, which rolled out in phases between 2022 and 2024 and replaced the older V2 interface. The important thing to understand: the underlying data did not change — the way you access it did. Same registry, new front door.

The registry is the same. The friction is in the access — captchas, one company at a time, no export. That distinction matters for everything that follows.

How to check MCA master data on the MCA portal (step by step)

Here's the free, no-login route for a single company. It takes about three minutes.

1. 1Go to mca.gov.in and open the MCA Services menu in the top navigation.
2. 2Under the Master Data section, choose "View Company/LLP Master Data." No login is needed for the basic record.
3. 3Enter the company name, CIN or LLPIN. CIN or LLPIN gives you an exact match; a name search may return several candidates to pick from.
4. 4Clear the captcha and submit.
5. 5Read the record. You'll see status, incorporation date, registered office, authorised and paid-up capital, class and category, directors with their DINs, and a summary of registered charges.
6. 6For charge details, open the Charges tab within the company profile; for a director's other companies, look up their DIN under the same Master Data menu.

That's the whole flow — and it's genuinely useful when you need to check one company, once.

Where the portal stops: the bulk and export problem

The free portal is built for a single, manual lookup. It shows one company per search, behind a captcha, with no export button. The moment your need scales past a single check, that design becomes the bottleneck:

• A KYB or onboarding team verifying hundreds of vendors can't captcha its way through the queue.
• A credit or lending team needs status, capital and charges inside its scoring model, not copy-pasted into a spreadsheet.
• A sales or research team wants to filter and segment thousands of companies by status, capital band, ROC or incorporation year — impossible one record at a time.
• Any workflow that needs the data refreshed on a schedule can't rebuild a manual search every week.

The data is public and the same for everyone. The constraint is purely how you get it out.

How to pull MCA company master data at scale with MCA Explorer

This is the gap we built MCA Explorer to close. It returns the same official MCA master data — sourced directly from the MCA registry, never resellers or stale caches — as clean, structured JSON through a single API call.

Send one reference — a company name, CIN, LLPIN, DIN or director name — and the workflow resolves the entity, reads its master data, attaches its directors, and indexes its charges and filings, all in a sub-second response. What the portal shows one company at a time behind a captcha, MCA Explorer returns for as many companies as you need, ready to drop into a CRM, credit model, diligence file or dashboard.

Pricing is published, not gated: ₹7.50 per successful lookup for company master data, director profiles or filings lists, and failed requests are never charged. Every account gets a free sandbox key the moment it's created, so you can see the exact shape of a live response before you commit to anything.

Who uses MCA master data, and how

• Due diligence & legal — confirm a company is ACTIVE, check its charges before a transaction, and map a director's other companies for conflict and fraud screening.
• Lending & credit — feed status, capital and charge data straight into underwriting instead of eyeballing a PDF.
• KYB / onboarding — verify vendors, partners and merchants against the government record at the moment of signup.
• Sales & lead generation — build and segment target lists by status, capital band, ROC or incorporation year.
• Research & journalism — trace ownership networks and corporate histories across previous names and CIN changes.

In every one of these, the master data isn't the destination — it's the input to a decision. Which is exactly why getting it as structured data, not a captcha-gated screen, changes the economics of the work.

MCA master data vs. certified ROC documents

One more distinction that saves teams real money. The free master data view is a live snapshot — status, capital, directors, a charges summary. Certified ROC documents (annual returns, financial statements, filed forms) are the full, legally weighty filings, and they cost a per-document fee and require an MCA login to download.

The rule of thumb: use master data to screen and decide, pull certified documents only when you need the underlying filing as evidence. MCA Explorer also lists every filed document by form type and year, so you know exactly which certified filing to request before you pay for it.

Start pulling MCA master data today

The record is public, official and free to view one company at a time. The value is in getting it as structured data, at the volume your work actually runs at — with directors, charges and filings attached, refreshed on a schedule, ready to feed whatever comes next.

Frequently asked questions