Beneficial owners
Last updated: 20 January 2026.
Beneficial owners are natural persons who in the last instance own or control an organisation. The organisation can have one, several or no beneficial owners.
All businesses obliged to register beneficial owners have to submit information to the Register of Beneficial Owners. This also applies when the business
- does not have any beneficial owners
- does not have any activity, or
- is listed on the stock exchange
Check if your organisation must register its beneficial owners
The result only tells you whether there is an obligation to register – not whether any information has already been registered.
Deadline for registration
All businesses obliged to register beneficial owners must register them no later than 14 days after the business is entered into a public register.
If the business gets new beneficial owners or other changes occur, the registered information must be updated within 14 days.
The register will impose daily fines if the obligation is not met.
Two laws with slightly different criteria to identify a beneficial owner
Both the Register on Beneficial Owners Act and the Anti-Money Laundering Act use the term beneficial owners, but have slightly different criteria to identify a beneficial owner.
The Register of Beneficial Owners has been established as a measure to counter money laundering, terrorist financing, and economic crime. The purpose of the register is to provide an overview of who actually controls businesses.
Frequently asked questions:
The register can levy daily fines (coercive fines) on obliged organisations that have not reported information about beneficial owners. The organisation will be notified through Altinn prior to this.
No, we cannot postpone the deadline.
Yes, you do. Irrespective of whether or not there is any activity, all organisations obliged to report this information must submit the form.
Yes, all entities that have not been struck off the register must submit the form (to avoid daily fines). The obligation only ceases once the organisation is removed from the Register of Business Enterprises/the Central Coordinating Register for Legal Entities.
No, the form for beneficial owners exists only in a digital version in Altinn.no. There are several ways to submit the form:
- The accountant and the auditor can submit the form on the organisation’s behalf.
- Some systems can provide a service through which it is possible to submit the form. If you use this type of system, you can check with the supplier whether this is a possibility.
Everyone registered with some kind of role in the Central Coordinating Register for Legal Entities, can obtain an electronic ID. In order to submit the form, you need a login with security level 3 (as a minimum), which corresponds to MinID. How to obtain an electronic ID (digdir.no).
The management, the accountant and the auditor can check this, in the organisation’s inbox in Altinn.
- Organisations who have registered information about beneficial owners will receive a decision letter in their inbox in Altinn. Together with this letter, there will be a register transcript confirming the registered information.
- In the organisation’s archive in Altinn, you will also find an archived version of the submitted form: Registration of beneficial owners, once the form has been submitted.
If you cannot find either of these, then the organisation has most likely not submitted the form. We cannot check this for you, as this information is excempt from public disclosure.
Yes, you can check this on My page.
You should consider whether or not there are anyone executing rights as shareholders meaning that they qualify as beneficial owners. If so, they can be registered as beneficial owners, and you can update any changes later.
If no one has this type of rights, it is possible to either:
- Register that the organisation does not have beneficial owners, if this was the only beneficial owner, or
- Register the other beneficial owners without reporting anything related to these particular shares, if there are other beneficial owners
and then update the information later.
We cannot say exactly when each organisation will be notified. However, the organisation will receive a notification in Altinn with a three week deadline to submit its information, before the daily fines start.