How to register a Danish company

The entity types, and which one you actually want

Enkeltmandsvirksomhed — a sole proprietorship. No share capital, no separate legal personality, and no protection: the business’s debts are your debts. Registration is free and takes minutes. It suits a side business, a freelance practice with no meaningful liability exposure, and anyone testing whether an idea earns anything at all. Owning one does not require living in Denmark — that is a persistent myth; what a non-resident lacks is MitID, which changes how the registration is filed and not whether it can be.

PMV (personligt ejet mindre virksomhed) — the same thing with a smaller turnover ceiling and no VAT registration. Only worth choosing if you are certain you will stay below the threshold.

ApS (anpartsselskab) — the private limited company, and the default for anything with employees, contracts, or a customer who will ask about liability insurance. It requires a minimum share capital, which is paid in at formation and is then the company’s money rather than lost. This is what most people mean by “registering a Danish company”.

A/S (aktieselskab) — the public limited company. A substantially higher capital requirement, a mandatory board, and formalities an owner-managed business does not need. Choose it because an investor or a regulator requires it, not because it sounds more serious.

I/S and K/S — the partnership forms, for two or more owners who want a shared vehicle without a capital company. An interessentskab means joint and several personal liability for every partner, which is a real commitment and not a formality. P/S (partnerselskab) is the hybrid: a capital company taxed at partner level, used mostly by professional firms.

For a first company the honest shortlist is two entries long: an enkeltmandsvirksomhed if you want to find out whether the business works, an ApS if you already know it does or if anything you sell could go expensively wrong.

The chicken-and-egg problem, and how the agent route solves it

The rule is that an ApS’s share capital must be paid in and confirmed before the Danish Business Authority will register the company. The obstacle is that a bank will not open an account for an entity that has no CVR number — and, separately, is likely to decline a newly formed company anyway, because anti-money-laundering monitoring is a fixed cost that a company with no trading history cannot cover.

The mechanism that resolves it: the capital is paid into the client account of a lawyer, auditor or incorporation service. Danish client accounts are segregated from the firm’s own money by rule, and the firm is entitled to confirm to the authority that the capital has been received. On that confirmation the company is registered. The money never touches a company account, because there is not one yet.

It leaves you with one job afterwards, and it is the job people underestimate: getting a business account so the capital can be released to the company. Expect the agent to insist on paying out to a Danish account, and expect that to be the slowest part of the whole exercise. Start the account application the day the CVR number lands.

Incorporating through a service rather than a law firm

A standard ApS formation is a template exercise: two documents, a capital confirmation, and a filing. Law firms price it as bespoke work; online incorporation services price it as the template it is, and the output filed with the authority is the same.

Dokument 24 is one of the Danish online services doing exactly that — a legal-document provider rather than a bank or a law firm, whose own jurists draw up the memorandum, the articles and the share register and file the registration with the Danish Business Authority. It handles a holding company on the same terms, and a holding company and a trading company formed together. The fee shown on the card below is its own; the Business Authority’s registration fee and the share capital itself sit on top of it — and the capital has to be paid to whoever is entitled to confirm receipt of it to the authority, so settle who is holding it, and on what terms, before you transfer anything.

The case for a lawyer instead is narrow but real: several shareholders with different rights, a holding structure built at the same time, share classes, an investor with a term sheet, or foreign owners with a complicated chain of ownership. If that is you, the price difference is the cheapest part of the transaction.

What the registration itself involves

Registration happens at virk.dk, the Danish Business Authority’s portal, whether you file it yourself or an agent files it for you. Registering a personally owned business is free; registering an ApS, A/S or P/S carries a fee, which is the authority’s and is separate from anything an agent charges you.

Filing it yourself requires MitID — which in practice means a Danish CPR number and the digital identity that comes with it. Not having one shuts you out of the self-service, not out of the register: the Business Authority’s own instruction is that if you do not have MitID you use form 40.110 instead, the paper route for a business not already registered in Denmark, emailed to the authority rather than filed at virk.dk. An English version of the form exists as 40.112.

The output is the CVR number: eight digits, issued the same day or the next, and thereafter the company’s identity for every purpose — tax, invoicing, contracts, and the DK prefix when you quote it abroad. The Business Authority publishes its own guidance on forming an ApS or A/S, including the current capital requirement.

Do you need to live in Denmark?

Not to own a Danish company. The Business Authority’s own guidance on forming an ApS states that no particular requirements are made of a founder’s nationality or residence, and the conditions company law puts on the management are about capacity and conduct rather than geography: of age, not disqualified from running a business here or elsewhere in the EU or EEA, and actually performing the role. Nobody has to live here.

The company does need an address. Hjemsted is defined in the act as the address in this country at which the company can be contacted, and the requirement is enforced rather than nominal — registered addresses are checked against the building register, the authority can go and look, and a company that cannot be reached at its own registered address is given a deadline and then sent for compulsory dissolution. Appointing a Danish name to the management to solve this is worse than useless: the registered management must be the people who actually run the company, and a nominee is illegal for both of you.

Nor to own a personally owned business, which is the point most guides get wrong. There is no rule that an enkeltmandsvirksomhed must belong to a Danish resident. What a non-resident lacks is MitID, and MitID is what the virk.dk self-service runs on, so the registration goes in on paper: form 40.110, sent to the Business Authority at its own address for these filings. A business resident in the EU or EEA can even be registered at its home-country address, if the only things it is registering for are VAT and ATP.

Where it turns conditional is the representative. The authority requires a representative resident in Denmark, jointly liable for the duties, when the business or its owner is resident outside the EU — and when an EU-resident business registers for import/export or for payroll tax. An EU-resident business with no fixed place of business here but a Danish c/o address needs a representative too, though that one carries no liability. Work out which of those you are before you fill the form in, because it decides what has to be attached to it.

What non-residence costs you, then, is friction rather than eligibility — the paper route instead of the portal, and a harder time at the bank. Without a Danish address the ordinary account providers will scrutinise the application more closely, and some will decline it: a Danish company with entirely foreign management is a legitimate profile and a slow compliance review.

Two things that are worth settling before incorporating rather than after: how the company will authenticate to the public authorities once registered, and which provider will actually give it an account. Both are harder from abroad, and both are on the critical path to receiving your own share capital.

What arrives with the CVR number

VAT registration. A company must register for moms once its taxable turnover in a twelve-month period passes the threshold in the VAT act, and may register voluntarily below it. Registering voluntarily is often the right call, because it lets you reclaim input VAT on start-up costs — which for a company buying equipment in its first year can be worth more than the administration costs.

Ownership registration. Capital companies must record their legal owners and their beneficial owners in the public registers. This is not optional and it is enforced: never registering beneficial owners, or registering them incompletely, is one of the grounds on which the Business Authority can ask the bankruptcy court to dissolve the company. It sets a deadline to put the omission right first, which is the part people find out about by missing it.

NemKonto. Every company needs one — the account the public authorities pay into for VAT refunds and overpaid corporation tax. A Danish bank account becomes the NemKonto more or less automatically. A foreign account can be nominated, but only by applying, and the processing takes months rather than days. If there is any prospect of an early VAT refund, this is a reason to prioritise a Danish account.

Digital Post. Correspondence from the authorities arrives digitally and is legally served whether or not anyone reads it. Set up access for someone who will, on the day the company is registered.

The annual report. A capital company files one every year, on a deadline, in a specified format. It is a cost of the ApS form that people rarely price in when comparing it to a sole proprietorship, and the late-filing consequences escalate quickly.