What is CIN? Company Identification Number Explained (2026)
CIN is the 21-character Company Identification Number issued by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs to every company registered in India. Each character carries meaning - from listing status through state and registration year - and you can decode it in seconds.
Open the printout of any Indian invoice, the footer of any company website, or the cover of any annual report and you'll usually find a line that reads "CIN: U72200KA2014PTC076171" or something just like it. That string is the Company Identification Number, and it's the closest thing Indian companies have to a passport. Once you can read it, you can verify a company exists, work out roughly when and where it was set up, and pull every public filing the Ministry of Corporate Affairs holds on it.
This guide walks through what a CIN is, what each character of those 21 alphanumeric digits actually means, and how to use one in everyday research.
So, what is a CIN?
CIN is short for Company Identification Number. The Ministry of Corporate Affairs issues one to every company that registers under the Companies Act, 2013 - Private Limited, Public Limited, One Person Company, Section 8 non-profits, and Producer companies all get one. LLPs are a different shape of entity and use a 7-character cousin called the LLPIN.
Every form a company files at MCA - the AOC-4 with its annual financial statements, the MGT-7 annual return, charge filings, board changes - gets stamped with that company's CIN. Which means once you have the CIN, you can read the company's whole public history.
Reading the 21 characters
A CIN looks random until you know the trick. It actually packs six pieces of information into one string. Take a real example and split it apart:
L 65990 MH 2010 PLC 123456
That first letter, L or U, tells you whether the company is listed on a stock exchange. L stands for listed, U for unlisted - and most Indian companies you'll come across are unlisted, so U is far more common.
The next five digits are the NIC-2008 industry code. 65990 covers "other financial service activities", 72200 is software, 10101 is meat processing, and so on. Every company picks one main activity at incorporation, and that becomes part of its identity.
Then come two letters for the state where the company was incorporated. MH is Maharashtra, DL is Delhi, KA is Karnataka, TN is Tamil Nadu - the same two-letter codes you see on vehicle plates, with a few exceptions.
After the state, you get the four-digit year of incorporation - straightforward - and then a three-letter tag that tells you the company's class. PTC means Private Limited, PLC is Public Limited, OPC is a One Person Company, NPL is a Section 8 non-profit, FLC marks a foreign company's Indian branch, and ULL is the rare unlimited-liability form.
The last six digits are the unique sequence number that the local Registrar of Companies hands out at incorporation. Think of it as the company's "queue number" within its state and year.
U72200KA2014PTC076171. Read left to right and you can already say the company is unlisted, in software services (NIC 72200), incorporated in Karnataka, started in 2014, set up as a Private Limited company, and was the 76,171st entity Karnataka's ROC registered.
Finding the CIN of a company
There are three ways most people use, depending on how much you already know.
The fastest is a quick lookup on Infyner. Type the company name, partial CIN or even a director's name into the advanced search and the platform resolves it against a 3.8-million-company index in seconds.
If you need the answer straight from the source, head to mca.gov.in and choose "MCA Services β Master Data β View Company / LLP Master Data". It's free for one record, but rate-limited and a bit clunky on a phone.
And if you're holding any official paperwork from the company, just look at it. Section 12 of the Companies Act, 2013 requires every company to print its CIN on letterheads, invoices, official emails and the website. So nine times out of ten, you don't have to look it up at all.
CIN vs LLPIN, FCRN, PAN, DIN - sorting out the alphabet soup
India has a long list of identifiers and they get mixed up constantly. The shortest way to keep them straight: CIN identifies a company, LLPIN identifies an LLP, FCRN identifies a foreign company's Indian branch, and PAN is what the Income Tax department uses for taxes - a company has both a CIN and a PAN, and they aren't interchangeable. DIN is different again - it identifies a person who sits on a board, not the company itself.
| Identifier | Issued by | Length | What it points to |
|---|---|---|---|
| CIN | MCA / ROC | 21 characters | A company under the Companies Act, 2013 |
| LLPIN | MCA / ROC | 7 characters | A Limited Liability Partnership |
| FCRN | MCA / ROC | 6 digits | The Indian branch of a foreign company |
| PAN | Income Tax | 10 chars | A taxpayer (which a company also is) |
| DIN | MCA | 8 digits | A specific director, not the company |
Does a CIN ever change?
For most companies, the CIN they get at incorporation is the one they carry forever. But three corporate moves do force MCA to reissue it, because the underlying information the CIN encodes has actually changed.
If a company moves its registered office to a different state, the state segment changes - say MH becomes KA - and you get a new CIN. If a private company lists on a stock exchange (or, less commonly, voluntarily delists), that opening U flips to L. And if the entity converts from Pvt Ltd to Public Ltd or to OPC, the three-letter class segment shifts too.
MCA keeps the older CINs in its history records, so when you're doing diligence on a company that's been through one of these changes, it's worth checking both the current and the previous CIN.
What you can actually do with a CIN
The CIN is the one piece of information you need before almost any India-corporate-data workflow. You can use it to check that a counterparty is a real registered company. You can pull the master data - the registered office, the date of incorporation, the assigned ROC, the authorised and paid-up capital. You can look up the people on the board and run their DINs against every other company they sit on (a useful trick for spotting shell-company patterns). You can read the annual returns and balance sheets the company has filed. And you can check whether there's an open NCLT or NCLAT case against the company on the insolvency rolls.
On Infyner, all of that is one click from the company profile.
Common questions
What does CIN stand for?
It stands for Company Identification Number. It's the 21-character code MCA assigns to every Indian company. LLPs use the equivalent LLPIN.
Is a CIN the same as a PAN?
No. CIN is from MCA and identifies the company on the corporate register. PAN is from the Income Tax department and identifies the company as a taxpayer. A company has both - they don't substitute for each other.
Can two companies share the same CIN?
No. The last six digits are a unique sequence number from the local ROC, and combined with the state and year segments they make every CIN one-of-a-kind. A new CIN is issued only when the state, listing status, or class genuinely changes.
Where is a company supposed to display its CIN?
Section 12 of the Companies Act, 2013 says every company must print its CIN on letterheads, invoices, business correspondence, official emails and the website. Skipping it carries a fine.
What's the easiest way to verify a CIN online?
Use Infyner's advanced search or MCA's "View Company Master Data" page. Both will return the company name, status and registered office for any valid CIN.
Where to go next
Once the CIN feels familiar, the natural next steps are to read about DIN for directors and LLPIN for partnerships, or to make sense of what each MCA status like Active or Strike-off actually means in practice. Or you can skip the theory and just look up a company.