State Business Registry Lookup: Where to Find Formation Dates and Owners in All 50 States

Every state runs a public register of the corporations, LLCs and partnerships formed inside it, and nearly all of them will let you search it in a browser without an account. That is the most underused fact in small-business acquisition. Give a registry a company name and you get back a formation date, a current standing, a registered agent with a street address, and in many states the officers or members who signed the filings. Free. No broker in the middle.

The friction is that all 51 registers live at 51 different URLs. Some sit on subdomains that look abandoned. Several were rebuilt in the last few years, so stale links still circulate on aggregator sites that resell a record the state gives away.

So here is the table. Every link below was checked with an HTTP request on 27 August 2026 and returned a 2xx status on the state's own domain or on the filing portal the state contracts with. Where a state's search application refused the request or would not connect, the row links the agency page that did verify, and the row is marked.

What a registry record actually gives you

The fields vary by state. The spine is consistent.

Formation or incorporation date. The day the entity came into legal existence in that state. For a business that kept one entity from the start, this is the founding date.

Entity status. Active, good standing, administratively dissolved, revoked, merged out. A lapsed annual report tells you something about how the office is being run.

Registered agent and address. The person or firm authorized to receive service of process. When the agent is the owner at a residential address, you are usually looking at a small owner-operated business.

Officers, directors or members. Published in some states, withheld in others. Where it exists it is the cleanest public link between a company and the human who owns it.

Filing history. Amendments, name changes, mergers, conversions, annual reports. A conversion from a corporation to an LLC in 2019 is a real event you can ask about later. Foreign qualifications in neighboring states show you the operating footprint for free.

Business entity search, all 50 states and DC

† This row links the agency page rather than the state's own search application. Open it in a browser and the search tool is one click away. Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Utah all answered an automated request with a flat 403. Michigan's search host failed the TLS handshake and Tennessee's timed out after 30 seconds. Kansas bounces its search app straight back to the Secretary of State page. Kentucky and Mississippi are linked at the office that runs the search.

‡ Texas is the one state where the free search and the official register are run by different agencies. The Comptroller's Franchise Tax Account Status search is free and returns an entity's franchise tax standing. The Secretary of State's own system, SOSDirect, states that "there is a $1.00 statutorily authorized fee associated with each search."

Why formation date is the signal worth pulling

Of everything a registry publishes, the formation date is the field an acquirer should care about most, and it is the one almost nobody uses.

A business registered in 1987 has been through at least four recessions. It has customer relationships older than most of the staff. Whatever it does, it does well enough that it kept doing it for thirty-nine years, and that is a durability test no pitch deck can fake.

Formation date is also a proxy for the owner's age. Someone who was 35 when they formed a company in 1987 turns 74 this year. Nobody has to tell you they are thinking about retiring. The register already did, four decades ago, and the arithmetic has been running ever since. That is the whole argument in our piece on owner succession as an off-market signal.

Pair it with a second clock and it sharpens. An SBA 7(a) or 504 loan carries a fixed maturity, so a decades-old company with a loan reaching payoff has a long-tenured owner and a dated financial decision at the same time. We work through that pairing in SBA loan data as an acquisition-timing signal. Scouly's data dictionary documents how the longevity field is built.

Where access gets awkward

Delaware charges for anything past the basics. Its Division of Corporations states that the free entity information "consists of the entity name, file number, incorporation/formation date, registered agent name, address, phone number and residency," and that "additional information can be obtained for a fee." Certificates of status and copies of filed documents go through a Delaware registered agent or the state's document request service.

Texas charges $1.00 per search on SOSDirect, as quoted above. Use the Comptroller's free franchise tax search first and pay only when you need the filing itself.

Nebraska is free to search and priced for bulk. Corporate filing images cost "$0.45 per page" and the site prices record batches at "$15/1000 records."

Bulk export is where states diverge most. Some publish a downloadable file of every registered entity, some sell one, and many offer nothing past the search form. Check the state's open-data page before assuming a file exists.

Officer disclosure is uneven. Some registers name the president and directors on the annual report. Others publish only a registered agent, and the agent is a law firm. When officers are missing, a Form 5500 filing on the DOL's EFAST system often names the plan administrator, who is usually the owner.

Reading a record the way a buyer reads it

Start with formation date and status, then look at four things most people skip.

The registered agent address. A residential street address means the owner is the agent. A national agent service usually means an accountant or an attorney set the entity up, so there are advisors already in the picture.

The gap between formation date and the first SBA loan. A company formed in 1994 that borrowed in 2016 probably changed hands in 2016. A fresh acquisition loan against an old business is what a sale looks like in public records.

Annual report lapses. A revocation and reinstatement in 2021 is a story. Sometimes it is an illness, sometimes a divorce, sometimes a bookkeeper who quit. It is a legitimate thing to ask about once you are talking.

Related filings under the same agent or address. Owners of one good business often own three. Searching the agent name instead of the company name surfaces the rest of the portfolio, and portfolios get sold together.

What a registry will never tell you

Revenue. Profit. Employee count. Whether the owner wants to sell. Registers are legal existence records, and any tool claiming to compute earnings from a formation date is guessing. Payroll bands come from PPP loan records, and a 2020 payroll figure is a dated estimate of one line item. Outside the U.S. the equivalent register is Companies House, which publishes far more financial detail than any American state. We cover it in finding off-market businesses through Companies House.

How Scouly uses registry data

Scouly tracks 173,769 companies across seven verticals, and registry longevity is one of three inputs to its deterministic 0 to 100 target score, alongside SBA loan maturity and local market fragmentation.

The honest version of the coverage: five state registries are integrated today, Texas, Florida, New York, Colorado and Connecticut, and companies in those states carry the registry's actual formation date. Everywhere else the longevity field falls back to the earliest SBA loan on record, which proves the business existed at least that far back and says nothing about how much older it might be. Every profile names which basis it used.

Nothing on Scouly is listed for sale. It is not a marketplace or a broker, no revenue or EBITDA is ever estimated, and no owner is ever contacted for you. The free Explorer tier includes ten full profile unlocks. Start with the markets index, the deal benchmark tool, or the guide for self-funded searchers.

Frequently asked questions

How do I look up a business by name in my state? Find your state in the table above and open its search link. Enter the legal entity name. A restaurant called Mario's may be registered as MDG Hospitality LLC, and most state searches support partial names and wildcard matching. If you only know the trade name, search your state's assumed name, DBA or fictitious name index, which the same office usually maintains.

Is a secretary of state business search free? For the basic record, in almost every state, yes. Formation date, status and registered agent usually cost nothing. Fees start when you want certified copies, certificates of good standing, scanned filings or bulk data. Delaware charges for anything past the basic fields and Nebraska prices record batches at $15 per 1,000. Texas is the odd one: its Secretary of State charges $1.00 per SOSDirect search, so use the Comptroller's free account status search instead. Any site charging you to see a company's formation date is reselling something free.

Can I find out who owns an LLC? Sometimes. States differ on whether they publish members and managers, and state registers generally do not carry beneficial ownership at all. What you can always see is the registered agent, and for owner-operated small businesses the agent is very often the owner at a home or shop address. Annual reports and Form 5500 filings fill in some of the rest.

What does a business formation date tell a buyer? It measures survival, which is the one thing public records prove well. Forty years of continuous registration means forty years of paying the bills. It also brackets the owner's likely age, which brackets how close they are to a succession decision. Read it as a screening input and confirm the real story in conversation.

Why do some state business searches block automated lookups? Because scrapers overwhelmed them. Ten of the state search applications behind the table above refused or would not connect for an automated request when they were checked on 27 August 2026, eight of them answering with a flat 403. Manual lookups in a browser work everywhere. If you need volume, look for the state's official bulk data product before you go near the search form.

Is there a national business registry in the United States? No. Company formation is a state function, so there are 51 separate registers with 51 formats and no common identifier. The closest thing to national coverage comes from federal programs: SBA 7(a) and 504 loan records, PPP loan records, and Department of Labor Form 5500 filings. Each covers only the companies that participated in that program.

Sources

• Delaware Division of Corporations, Entity Search
• Texas Secretary of State, SOSDirect
• Nebraska Secretary of State, Corporation and Business Entity Search
• SBA 7(a) and 504 FOIA loan data
• SBA PPP FOIA loan data
• DOL EFAST2, Form 5500 filings
• UK Companies House register