Can you search a GSTIN by company name? What works and what does not

The "Search Taxpayer" menu on the GST portal, available without logging in, has four entries as of 4 October 2026: search by GSTIN or UIN, search by PAN, search by temporary ID, and search composition taxpayer. We could not find a search by legal name or trade name on the portal or in its official guides. We say "could not find" rather than "does not exist" because we can only report what the portal and its documentation show.

Search by GSTIN asks for a captcha before login and returns the legal name, trade name, effective date of registration, constitution of business, principal place of business, cancellation date if any, and filing details. Names appear only as results, never as the thing you type.

Search by PAN is a separate page on the same portal: one field for a PAN and a Search button. GSTN's own notice about misuse of PANs describes it as showing whether any GSTIN exists on that PAN, "No records found" if none, and otherwise the GSTINs, provisional IDs and UINs mapped to that PAN across India. It is a manual page for people. We found no public API for it.

Company names are not unique and are written inconsistently. "Sri Lakshmi Traders" can be many different businesses, and one business appears as "M/s Sri Lakshmi Traders", "SRI LAKSHMI TRADERS (P) LTD" and "Lakshmi Traders" on different documents. A search that matched on names would return a list a person had to guess from, which is the wrong way to decide whom to pay.

A GSTIN is the opposite: exactly one registration. And the PAN inside it ties together every registration of one legal entity. Both are far better keys, which is probably why the portal is built around them.

1. Ask for it. A supplier's tax invoice normally shows its GSTIN, and a GSTIN is public: anyone can look one up on the portal. Asking is the most reliable route and the one that avoids a mismatch.
2. Read it off an existing document: a past invoice, a purchase order, an e-way bill, the supplier's website footer or letterhead.
3. If you only have the PAN, list the GSTINs registered on it, using the portal's Search by PAN page by hand or an API for volume.
4. If you have none of these, treat the name as unverified until the supplier confirms a number. We do not offer a name search, because a name match is a guess and not a confirmation.

Our PAN endpoint, GET /v1/pan/{pan}/gstins, does the multi-state search programmatically. Because the last character of a GSTIN is a fixed function of the first fourteen, we can compute the one possible GSTIN for that PAN in each of the 36 state and union territory codes in use, with entity code 1, and run a normal live lookup on each. It returns those that exist, whether each is active, and the full registration record for each.

It does not search the portal's PAN page and is not guaranteed to match it. Two limits to know about. It tries entity code 1 in each state, so a second registration on the same PAN in the same state is not found. And a PAN with no registration, or whose only registration in a state uses an entity code other than 1, returns nothing for that state.

If every one of the 36 lookups fails upstream, the call returns an error and is not charged; if some fail, the response is marked incomplete and lists the states it could not check. A search that completes and finds nothing is still charged. A search costs ₹3.50 flat from a separate PAN-search balance, regardless of how many GSTINs it finds, and is limited to 5 searches a minute per key.