The LEI in Numbers: Active LEI Population Surpasses 3 Million in Q1 2026
Latest milestone reflects the expanding use of the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) across sectors and regions – reaffirming the Global LEI System’s position as a proven, standardized, and internationally recognized organizational identity management infrastructure and a global Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI).
Author: Alexandre Kech
Date: 2026-04-28
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The Global LEI Foundation (GLEIF) is proud of its ongoing transparency initiatives, including its open approach to providing unrestricted access to the latest LEI data from around the world with the Quarterly LEI System Business Reports, which are made publicly available free of charge. Through this ‘LEI in Numbers’ blog series, GLEIF highlights key data from the latest report, explaining trends and profiling successes from the global LEI rollout.
The Global LEI System surpassed another major milestone in Q1 2026. Around 100,000 organizations from across the world chose to obtain an LEI – whether to support compliance with a regulatory mandate, realize the significant commercial benefits that come from increased trust and transparency, or a combination of both.
Such proactive adoption took the total active LEI population past 3 million, eventually reaching 3.02 million by the end of the quarter. This represents a strong quarterly growth rate of 3.4% and brings the total LEI population – which includes both active LEIs and LEIs that have been retired as entities ceased operations – to over 3.26 million.
The increasing scale and coverage of the Global LEI System further reaffirm its position as a proven, internationally recognized organizational identity management infrastructure and a global Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI). Growing adoption beyond the LEI’s traditional origins in capital markets – such as payments, global value chains, and digital asset markets – reflects the urgent and growing need for greater transparency, accountability, and interoperability across borders and ecosystems. This is why GLEIF is committed to working collaboratively to further the uptake of both the LEI and the verifiable LEI (vLEI) for the good of more organizations, industries, and economies.
The ongoing application of the European Union’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) was a driver of LEI adoption in Q1 2026, maintaining the trend seen throughout 2025. Latvia had the highest growth rate at the jurisdictional level at 11.5%, with Lithuania (5.9%) and Romania (5.7%) also seeing strong increases in issuance.
Robust growth also continued in India (8.1%). The latest regulatory development came in March, with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) issuing a master direction making the LEI compulsory for all market participants — including residents and non-residents — in RBI-regulated financial markets. This consolidates existing LEI requirements across government securities, money market instruments, foreign exchange (FX) instruments, and derivatives.
Elsewhere, the Global LEI System's expanding reach was demonstrated by notable growth in Brazil (9%). In addition to the market activities of local LEI issuers, the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB) is preparing its regulatory framework, which, among other advancements, will enable LEI integration in cross-border payments to align with the G20 roadmap.
The Global LEI System empowers everyone, everywhere with open, standardized, and high-quality data that is regularly re-validated to ensure it is accurate, up-to-date, and usable – promoting trust and transparency across the global economy. Key data points tracked within the Quarterly LEI System Business Reports are:
Renewal rates
The Global LEI System is unique in providing absolute transparency regarding when entity data was last verified, with the annual renewal process ensuring that both legal entities and LEI issuers review and re-validate legal entity reference data at least once per year.
Strong growth in new issuance was again complemented by robust renewals in Q1 2026, with the overall renewal rate remaining stable at 56.6%. Renewals in EU jurisdictions tapered slightly to 61.1%, while the increase in non-EU jurisdictions to 49.6% was primarily driven by continued upticks in the U.S. and the UK.
The jurisdictions with the highest renewal rates were Japan (89.3%), Finland (81.8%), India (77.6%), Germany (74.5%), and Saudi Arabia (73.9%).
Corroboration
Corroboration is the process of verifying the existence of a legal entity and its reference data – such as name, address, legal form, and corporate structures – against authoritative sources listed in the GLEIF Registration Authority List. LEI issuers validate the information provided by the legal entity by comparing it against the publicly available authoritative data.
At the end of Q1 2026, 87.6% of LEIs were fully corroborated. This means that all reference data elements have been validated against public authoritative sources.
Parent information reporting
Identifying the direct and ultimate parents of a legal entity, and vice versa, answers the question of 'who owns whom'. This allows users to connect the dots and enables deeper insights into ownership structures across corporate groups.
In Q1 2026, over 3.13 million LEI registrants – representing 99% of the total active LEI population – reported information on their direct and ultimate parents. 100% of LEI registrants that obtained a newly issued LEI or renewed an existing LEI in this quarter reported parent information.
Fund relationship reporting
Many legal entities with an LEI are investment funds. To better understand the relationships between fund entities and investment funds globally, three main types of fund relationships are identified: fund management entities, umbrella structures, and master-feeder structures.
Over 155,000 legal entities reported fund relationship structures in Q1 2026, an increase of nearly 3,000 on the previous quarter. Among those, 66.8% were funds managed by a main management entity, 32.6% were sub-funds to umbrella funds, and 0.6% were feeder funds.
Entity categorization
To address the unique considerations they pose and ensure high data quality, dedicated categories have been created for identifying government entities and international organizations. In Q1 2026, over 6,700 entities were identified as government entities (up from 6,600 in Q4 2025) and 82 as international organizations (up from 81 in Q4 2025).
For the full report, which includes further detail on the status of LEI issuance and growth potential, the level of competition between LEI issuing organizations in the Global LEI System, and Level 1 and 2 reference data, please visit the Global LEI System Business Reports page.
If you are interested in reviewing the latest daily LEI data, our Global LEI System Statistics Dashboard contains daily statistics on the total and active number of LEIs issued. This feature now enables any user to review historical data by geography, increasing transparency on the overall progress of the LEI.
For further details or to access historical data, please visit the Global LEI System Business Report Archive.
We look forward to sharing our progress each quarter as we continue to drive LEI adoption in 2026.
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Alexandre Kech is the CEO of the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF).
Prior to joining GLEIF, Alexandre Kech was Head of Digital Securities at the SIX Digital Exchange. As a member of the Executive Board, Alex had full executive responsibility for the Digital Securities business vertical, including sales and relationship management, product development, business design, and ecosystem expansion.
Over the past 25 years, Alex has constructed a unique career combining finance at BNY Mellon, payments/securities infrastructure and standards at SWIFT, and blockchain and digital assets at Onchain Custodian (ONC) and, most recently, Citi Ventures. As co-founder and CEO of ONC, Alex led the Singapore and Shanghai-based team that built custody and prime brokerage services for crypto and other digital assets from scratch. As Blockchain & Digital Asset director at Citi Ventures, he built a team to engage the European ecosystem on emerging use cases for blockchain technologies and digital assets.
Alex is also involved in industry and standardization initiatives. As the convenor of the ISO TC 68 / SC8 / WG3, which produced the ISO 24165 Digital Token Identifier (DTI), he is a member of the DTI Foundation Product Advisory Committee. He also recently served as co-chair of the Global Digital Finance (gdf.io) custody working group.
Alex earned a bachelor’s degree in translation and an Executive MBA from the Quantic School of Business and Technology while building Onchain Custodian, putting theory into practice in real-time.
