LEI status: issued, lapsed, retired

Every LEI record has a registration status, and it is worth reading carefully because it describes the state of the registration, not the company. “Issued” means the LEI is active and its data has been renewed on schedule.

“Lapsed” means the annual renewal is overdue. The entity may be perfectly healthy — someone simply did not renew — but counterparties often treat a lapsed LEI with caution. “Retired” means the LEI has been permanently closed, usually because the entity ceased to exist or merged into another.

Separately, each record has an entity status of “active” or “inactive”, describing whether the legal entity itself still exists. So an LEI can be “lapsed” (registration overdue) while the entity is still very much “active”. On LEIatlas both are shown as badges on the entity page, and a lapsed-and-inactive shell is de-emphasised so it does not clutter search.