Which ROC Will Handle Your Company? Jurisdiction After the 2026 MCA Restructure

Your company does not choose its Registrar of Companies. Its registered office does. Put the office in South Delhi and one Registrar holds your file; move it a few kilometres into West Delhi and, since February 2026, a different Registrar holds it. That sounds like trivia until a notice lands, a hearing is called, or you shift your office and discover the file has to cross from one Registrar's jurisdiction to another.

Here is the short answer first. The Ministry of Corporate Affairs redrew the map for its busiest regions through notification S.O. 4850(E), dated 23 October 2025, and the new offices started work on 16 February 2026. Delhi split in two. Haryana got its own Registrar at Chandigarh. Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra were carved up by district, and Kolkata split from the rest of West Bengal. If your registered office sits anywhere else, your Registrar did not change. This post walks through what changed, what stayed put, and how to confirm your own company's Registrar in about two minutes. It expands the jurisdiction section of our private limited company registration page, which carries the same map in short form.

The one rule that decides your ROC

Section 396 of the Companies Act, 2013 lets the Central Government set up registration offices and fix the territory each one covers. Your company's Registrar is the one whose territory contains your registered office address. Not your factory. Not your biggest branch. Not the city where you actually sit and work every day.

The registered office wins. Every time.

That is why two companies on the same Delhi street can now answer to two different Registrars — the street crosses a district line, and the district is what the notification counts. It is also why picking a registered office address is no longer a throwaway decision at incorporation. You are picking your regulator's counter along with your letterhead address.

What changed on 16 February 2026

S.O. 4850(E) established ten Registrars with district-level territories. It was first meant to start on 1 January 2026. A second notification, S.O. 6112(E) dated 30 December 2025, moved the start to 16 February 2026 and changed nothing else — same offices, same district lines, later date. The table below follows the schedule to S.O. 4850(E) itself.

Read the Uttar Pradesh-I row carefully. The schedule names its districts one by one, and the list runs to dozens of names. I have not reproduced it in full here, because a half-copied district list is worse than none — founders act on it. If your office is in Uttar Pradesh and your district is not in the NOIDA list above, do not guess from this table. Use the master data check further down. It settles your Registrar by name, not by inference.

Three practical consequences follow from this table. Gurugram and Faridabad companies left Delhi's register for Chandigarh — founders there still say "ROC Delhi" out of habit, and the habit is now wrong. A Thane or Nashik company is a Mumbai-II file, not a Mumbai file. And a company sitting in Salt Lake or Howrah answers to Kolkata-II, while one inside Kolkata district answers to Kolkata-I.

What did not change

Plenty stayed exactly where it was.

Offices the notification does not name kept their territories. Pune still has its own Registrar for its side of Maharashtra — that is why Pune and Kolhapur appear in none of the three Maharashtra rows above. Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and the other existing offices were not touched by this notification at all. If your state is not Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra or West Bengal, nothing in S.O. 4850(E) moves your file.

Incorporation itself did not move either. New companies are still processed centrally by the Central Registration Centre through SPICe+, wherever the registered office will be. Your jurisdictional Registrar matters for the life after the certificate — the record, the scrutiny, the correspondence — not for which desk approves your incorporation.

Your CIN did not change. Neither did your incorporation date, your name, or anything you have already filed. And you file nothing merely because your Registrar changed. The notification establishes offices; it asks companies for no form, no fee and no intimation. Files simply sit with the new office from 16 February 2026.

What your ROC actually does with your company

Founders meet their Registrar in four situations, mostly.

Your record lives there. The master data the world checks — status, capital, directors, registered office — is maintained against your Registrar's register, and certified copies and public documents come from that record.

Scrutiny lands there. Annual filings and event-based filings are examined by officers, defects are marked, and resubmission remarks carry that office's name. A badly drafted filing does not go to some national pool. It comes back from your Registrar.

Notices start there. When the Registrar calls for information, seeks an explanation, or starts an inquiry into how a company is being run, the letter comes from the office holding your file — and any hearing or physical appearance happens there too. This is the part founders feel most. A Chandigarh hearing is a different day from a Delhi hearing if your team sits in Gurugram.

Approvals route there. Matters the Act reserves to the Registrar — extensions, condonations and a long list of applications — are filed to, and decided by, your jurisdictional office.

ROC is not RD — and the split made that line sharper

Above the Registrars sit the Regional Directors. The MCA's own announcement of 31 December 2025, issued through PIB, opened three new Regional Directorates alongside the new Registrars: the Northern Region directorate split into NR-I at New Delhi (Delhi and Uttar Pradesh) and NR-II at Chandigarh (Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Chandigarh, Ladakh and Jammu and Kashmir), the Western Region split as well, and a new South-Western directorate took charge at Bengaluru.

You will deal with the Regional Director far less often than with your Registrar. But one everyday matter sits with the Director, not the Registrar: shifting your registered office from one Registrar's jurisdiction to another within the same state needs the Regional Director's confirmation under Section 12 of the Act. Read that again after the Delhi split. Before February 2026, moving an office from Saket to Janakpuri stayed inside one Registrar's territory. Today Saket is Delhi-I and Janakpuri is Delhi-II, so the same local move crosses a jurisdictional line and picks up the confirmation step. Small move. New paperwork. I see founders caught by exactly this kind of quiet change.

How to check your own company's ROC

Do not decode it. Look it up. The MCA master data names your Registrar in plain words, and it is the record that counts.

1. Go to mca.gov.in and open MCA Services, then Master Data, then View Company/LLP Master Data. You may be asked to sign in as a registered user; the basic record is free.
2. Search by your CIN if you have it, or by company name and pick your company from the matches.
3. Read the ROC name shown on the master record. That is your Registrar today — Delhi-I, Delhi-II, Haryana at Chandigarh, whichever the record states.
4. If the record and your district reading of the table disagree, trust the record and ask your professional to look closer. District boundaries and the names used in the schedule do not always match the address a founder has in mind.

Now the CIN point, because it trips people up. A CIN is a 21-character code, and part of it does speak about geography: the two letters at positions seven and eight are the state code — DL for Delhi, MH for Maharashtra, KA for Karnataka. The three letters after the incorporation year are not a Registrar code at all; they state the class of company, PTC for a private limited company, PLC for a public one. So a Delhi CIN tells you "Delhi". It cannot tell you Delhi-I or Delhi-II. Think of the state code the way you read a PIN code: the opening digits place you in the right city, but they were never meant to name the counter inside the post office. The split offices share one state code, which is why the master data lookup — not CIN arithmetic — is the check that settles it.

If you are incorporating now, choose the address with open eyes

None of this should scare you off an address. It should stop you borrowing one carelessly. A friend's office address across a district line now fixes a different Registrar, a different hearing city in the Haryana case, and a Regional Director confirmation if you later bring the office back across the line. Pick the registered office you can genuinely maintain — receive notices at, keep records linked to, defend in a scrutiny — and the jurisdiction question answers itself. Our guide to the registered office address rules sets out what that address must satisfy.

If you are setting up a company and want the jurisdiction read correctly before the first filing goes in, start with our private limited company registration service — tell us the address you plan to use and we will confirm your Registrar, then file.