If You Own a Registered Business in Nigeria, Check the CAC Website Before the End of This Week
100,000 companies are about to be struck off Nigeria’s corporate register. Yours might be one of them and you may not even know it yet.
Running a business in Nigeria is already complicated enough without discovering that your company no longer legally exists, but that is exactly the situation that could be waiting for the owners of up to 100,000 Nigerian companies who have not been paying attention to their filing obligations with the Corporate Affairs Commission.
On July 15 2026 the CAC announced the commencement of Batch 6 of its ongoing compliance enforcement exercise, placing 100,000 companies at risk of being permanently struck off Nigeria’s official companies register for failing to file outstanding annual returns and submit information on Persons with Significant Control, also known as beneficial ownership information, as required under Section 692 of the Companies and Allied Matters Act 2020.
The affected companies have been given 90 days to fix the problem. After that, no second chances.
The CAC was unambiguous about this: companies that fail to comply within the stipulated timeline will be struck off the register without further notice, and once that happens the consequences are serious, a struck-off company is deemed dissolved, doing business through it becomes unlawful, and restoring it to the register requires a Federal High Court order, which is expensive, time-consuming and entirely avoidable if the problem is addressed now.
This is not a new exercise and that context matters.
The CAC deregistered over 400,000 companies in 2025 alone for the same reasons, and in February 2026 it announced plans to strike off another 100,000 for prolonged inactivity and non-compliance, meaning Batch 6 represents yet another wave of an ongoing effort to clean up Nigeria’s corporate register and remove the ghost companies, inactive entities and persistently non-compliant businesses that have been cluttering it for years.
The goal behind the exercise is legitimate and important, maintaining an accurate corporate register strengthens investor confidence in Nigeria’s business environment, improves transparency around who owns and controls Nigerian companies, and aligns with international anti-money laundering standards that require governments to maintain clear and credible records of corporate entities operating within their borders.
But for the small business owner, the entrepreneur who registered a company three years ago and has been too busy actually running the business to think about CAC filings, or the startup founder who incorporated early and forgot that annual returns are an ongoing obligation not a one-time formality, the immediate concern is simpler and more personal: is my company on that list?
The answer is easy to find. The CAC has published the names of all 100,000 affected companies on its official website at cac.gov.ng, and checking takes less than five minutes, after which companies that find themselves on the list should file all outstanding annual returns immediately, submit their Persons with Significant Control information and send evidence of compliance to the CAC’s designated email address.
Annual returns in Nigeria must be filed within 42 days of a company’s annual general meeting for companies that hold AGMs, or by June 30 each year for small companies exempt from holding AGMs, and the filing covers basic company information, details of directors and shareholders and confirmation that the company is still active, none of which is particularly complex but all of which has a deadline that the CAC is now enforcing with considerably less patience than it has shown in previous years.
Ninety days sounds like a comfortable window until it is not, and the companies that treat this notice as something to deal with later are the ones that will find themselves with a dissolved company and a Federal High Court problem before the year is out.
Check the list today, it takes five minutes and it could save you considerably more than that.
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