Lapsed LEIs by Country: Where Are Renewals Most Often Missed?

What we measured

We analysed the Level 1 LEI Golden Copy published by GLEIF at 08:00 UTC on 22 September 2026. It contained 3,437,564 LEI records.

The calculation is deliberately narrow. We kept records where the legal entity status was ACTIVE, then counted only LEI registration statuses ISSUED and LAPSED. For each legal jurisdiction, the lapse share is:

LAPSED ÷ (ISSUED + LAPSED)

GLEIF defines a lapsed record as an LEI registration that was not renewed by its next renewal date and is not known from public sources to have ceased operating. That is different from the entity itself being inactive. The distinction matters: a late record and a closed company are not the same thing.

Download the full country results as CSV. It includes all 229 legal jurisdictions with at least one eligible record, including small countries omitted from the tables below.

The global result

Of 3,174,453 active-entity records with an issued or lapsed registration status, 1,201,818 were lapsed. The resulting global lapse share was 37.86%.

This is a stock measure on one date. It does not show how many organisations renewed during a year, how quickly lapsed records were restored, or why the status differed between countries.

Countries with the highest lapse shares

To avoid dressing tiny samples up as national patterns, we ranked only jurisdictions with at least 1,000 active issued-or-lapsed records. Seventy-one jurisdictions met that threshold.

China is the outlier: 98,056 of 100,563 eligible records were lapsed. The United States and United Kingdom also sit well above the 37.86% global share, and their denominators are much larger than most of the top ten.

That tells us where lapsed status was concentrated in this snapshot. It does not tell us the cause. Differences in LEI use, local rules, the age of the record population and renewal behaviour may all matter, but this dataset alone cannot separate them. A large percentage is not permission to improvise a story.

Countries with the lowest lapse shares

The other end of the ranking also contains large LEI populations. India had the largest eligible population in the dataset, with 391,818 records, and a lapse share of 16.36%. Germany, Italy and the Netherlands also combined sizeable denominators with shares below the global figure.

Japan's 13.74% was the lowest share among jurisdictions that met the threshold. Again, this is descriptive. It is not a league table of corporate virtue, regulatory quality or data accuracy.

What the country field means

We grouped records by Entity.LegalJurisdiction, which GLEIF defines as the jurisdiction where the entity was legally formed and registered. The field may contain a two-letter country code or a country-and-region code; we used the country component.

That is not necessarily the address of the headquarters, the country where a trade takes place or the nationality of an owner. It is the legal jurisdiction recorded for the entity. Mixing those concepts would give the table a confidence it has not earned.

What a lapsed LEI means in practice

A lapsed status says the LEI record passed its next renewal date without renewal. It does not mean the identifier has been reassigned, and it does not automatically mean the entity has closed. GLEIF has separate entity and registration status fields precisely because those are different questions.

If you are checking a supplier, borrower or counterparty, the individual record is what counts. Confirm the LEI, legal name, entity status, registration status and next renewal date in the current GLEIF data. Our guide to verifying an LEI explains the checks, while the LEI renewal guide covers how a lapsed record can be brought current.

The country table is useful for understanding the shape of the database. It is a poor substitute for checking the business in front of you.

Method and limitations

We downloaded the complete GLEIF Level 1 Golden Copy CSV, CDF version 3.1, published at 08:00 UTC on 22 September 2026. GLEIF says its Golden Copy includes all LEIs ever published and removes technical duplicates.

We processed all 3,437,564 rows. Records were eligible when Entity.EntityStatus was ACTIVE and Registration.RegistrationStatus was either ISSUED or LAPSED. We excluded 262,030 rows whose entity status was INACTIVE or NULL, plus 1,081 active records in pending transfer or pending archival states. There were no eligible records with a missing or invalid legal jurisdiction.

Country shares were calculated from integer counts before rounding to two decimal places. A minimum denominator of 1,000 records was applied only to the ranking; smaller jurisdictions remain in the download so readers can inspect the full result without mistaking them for stable national patterns.

The analysis is reproducible from the stated snapshot, but the live database changes throughout the day. GLEIF publishes three Golden Copy sets daily. Later downloads will not necessarily reproduce these exact counts.

Frequently asked questions

Is a lapsed LEI invalid?

LAPSED means the record was not renewed by its next renewal date. It does not mean the code has been reassigned or that the entity has necessarily stopped operating. Whether a current status is required depends on the transaction and rule that brought the LEI into use.

Is the lapse share the same as an annual renewal rate?

No. The lapse share is the proportion of eligible records in lapsed status at one point in time. An annual renewal rate would need a defined cohort and observation period, including records renewed, allowed to lapse and restored during that period.

Why exclude retired and duplicate records?

They describe different states. A retired record relates to an entity that ceased operating, while a duplicate is a non-surviving registration for the same entity. Including either in an issued-versus-lapsed denominator would answer a different question.