Status of the Belgian company database: scope, fields and limits

The Belgian company database

Counted in our database on 5 November 2026: 779,149 records, 696,077 of them with phone, email or website. The basis is the places of Overture Maps (Overture Maps Foundation, Places, release 2026-10-21.0, downloaded on 31 October 2026; places in Belgium, excluding 2,604 places in geographical categories (rivers, lakes, mountains …) and 4,651 cash machines, charging points and parcel lockers), supplemented with the contact details that the businesses publish on their own websites. We do not use the Crossroads Bank for Enterprises (KBO/BCE): its open data require registration.

• 779,149records in total (businesses and establishments)
• 742,372active records (not marked as permanently closed)
• 696,077with phone, email or website
• 645,312with phone number
• 294,454with their own email address
• 464,803with website

As of 5 November 2026. Active means: the source does not mark the place as permanently closed; 36,777 records carry that mark. The contact figures refer to all records; a record can have several contact fields, so the figures overlap and must not be added up. Contact means phone, website or own email address; only Belgian phone numbers (+32) are counted. An email address only counts as the record’s own address if it is not shared by three or more records (11,882 such addresses are excluded); with any email address there are 329,288 records. A record is a business or an establishment with its own location; a business with several locations can appear more than once.

What the company websites have added so far

We visit the websites that the places list and read the contact details published on the contact page, in the legal information and in the footer: email addresses of the kind that belong to the business itself or to a freemail service (not addresses of a web designer on another domain), and phone numbers only from tel: links and structured data, not from free text. Numbers found on five or more domains (hosting providers, web agencies) are discarded. On 5 November 2026, 265,237 of 338,056 domains had been processed (78.5%); 214,758 websites were reachable, 163,286 of them with an email address and 97,715 with a phone number. The collection is still running; the figures will change.

The websites added an own email address to around 103,000 records and a phone number to 9,133 records. The number of records with at least one contact barely changes: we only visit websites that are already attached to a record, and such records already count as records with a contact. The small decrease (696,106 → 696,077) comes from email addresses that are now shared by three or more records and therefore no longer count as an own address. Enterprise numbers found on websites are not yet linked to the records.

For comparison: size of the market

Statbel counted 1,202,139 VAT-registered businesses at the end of December 2025 (sections A to U and unknown activity, including the self-employed). Our basis is the places from Overture Maps, which partly differ from that count: one business can have several places, and many self-employed people have no place of their own. Collecting from websites adds contact details to existing records, but no new records. The Statbel figure is therefore a comparison, not a stock and not a promise; we only deliver what the database actually contains and the quote confirms.

By province

The province follows from the postcode of the record’s address; Brussels is a region and not part of any province. The number of establishment units according to Statbel is shown alongside for comparison.

The table can be scrolled sideways.

With contact = with phone, website or own email address. Official figure: Statbel, number of establishment units by municipality, fourth quarter of 2024, 2025 municipal boundaries, retrieved on 4 November 2026. Our records have not been matched to the official establishment units (Statbel counts every registered unit, also without a website or a sign on the street), so the two columns are not directly comparable.

Status by industry

The 21 industries with their NACE-BEL codes, the official number of businesses and the price for a one-off export of the whole industry (excluding VAT). None of the records in our database has been assigned to an industry yet, so there are no figures of our own per industry. The quote states the scope of your selection.

The table can be scrolled sideways.

– = no industry assignment in the database yet. Official figure: Eurostat, structural business statistics 2024; agriculture: Statbel, VAT-registered businesses at the end of December 2025; municipalities: after the mergers of 1 January 2025. What is counted per industry and the source in detail are given on each industry page. The industry figures cannot be added up to the total, because some industries overlap and agriculture and municipalities are counted differently.

Contact coverage

Share of records with a stored phone number, own email address or website, across all records and across active records only. There are no figures per industry yet.

The table can be scrolled sideways.

The records come from map data, which mainly list businesses with a location and contact details; the shares apply to these records, not to all businesses in Belgium. The share describes for how many records a contact field is stored, not how many numbers or mailboxes can be reached.

What the contact fields are for

Phone, email address and website help you match records in your CRM, detect duplicates and look up businesses. For marketing, Belgian rules apply: email without consent only to impersonal addresses of legal entities for products intended for legal entities (Royal Decree of 4 April 2003), calls only after screening against the Do Not Call Me list. More in the guides B2B email and the Royal Decree of 2003 and telemarketing and the Do Not Call Me list.

Keep four terms apart

• Present: the field contains a value in the stored records.
• Current: a statement about the status of the source; it does not guarantee the value is unchanged today.
• Reachable: a letter can be delivered or a number reached. Our field counts do not prove this.
• Lawfully usable: your specific purpose must be lawful. Buying data does not replace any consent that is required.

For a clean import, handle empty fields and possible duplicates explicitly in your import process. The export and sample file page shows the columns and checks.

For comparison: official statistics

The following figures come from Eurostat and Statbel. They describe the market, not our database, and count by their own rules.

• 931,405businesses in industry, construction and market services (Eurostat SBS 2024)
• 1,202,139VAT-registered businesses at the end of December 2025, including the self-employed (Statbel)
• 1,429,763establishment units in the fourth quarter of 2024 (Statbel)
• 33,046,830businesses in the other 26 EU member states (Eurostat 2024)

Belgium: Eurostat, Structural Business Statistics (sbs_ovw_act), number of enterprises, NACE B–S excluding O and S94, reference year 2024, Eurostat update of 30 September 2026, retrieved on 4 November 2026; VAT-registered businesses: Statbel, VAT-registered businesses, demographic development by sector, end of December 2025, retrieved on 4 November 2026; establishment units: Statbel, number of establishment units by municipality. EU: Eurostat, Structural Business Statistics (sbs_ovw_act), EU-27 33,978,235 minus Belgium 931,405. More: EU and other markets.

How to read the figures

• A count is not a delivery promise. The figures describe the records on the reference date; the figure in the quote is binding for your selection.
• Official statistics are not a dataset. The figures from Eurostat and Statbel describe the market, not the size of our exports.
• The field you need is what counts. How many records in a selection have a complete address, a phone number or a general email address is stated in the quote.
• Page date is not data status. Revising this page does not change the status of the data.

Published versions

• 5 November 2026 – first version, counted status

  779,149 records, 742,372 of them active and 696,077 with at least one contact (645,312 with phone, 294,454 with own email address, 464,803 with website), breakdown by province and the contribution of the company websites so far. Source: Overture Maps plus company websites.