Direct links to official government portals — organized, explained, and always free. No subscriptions. No paywalls.
Curated by the Searchadex editorial team — researchers with backgrounds in commercial banking, underwriting, and compliance due diligence. Last verified: September 2026.
A business entity lookup is a free search of an official state government database that confirms the legal status of an LLC, corporation, limited partnership, or other formally registered business. Every state maintains its own Secretary of State (or equivalent) portal, and every active entity must appear in its home state's database to remain in good standing. Searchadex links directly to these official portals — no aggregators, no paywalls, no resold data.
Business entity records are most often searched by commercial lenders verifying borrowers before closing, attorneys conducting due diligence, compliance teams onboarding new vendors, small business owners vetting partners or suppliers, journalists tracing corporate ownership, and job seekers confirming employer legitimacy. A few minutes on a Secretary of State portal can reveal whether a counterparty is actually a real, active entity — or a forfeited shell.
Official portals return entity status (active, suspended, dissolved, or forfeited), formation date, entity type, registered agent name and address, principal office address, and in many states, filed documents like Articles of Incorporation, Articles of Organization, and annual reports. What they won't show you is beneficial ownership beyond listed officers, financial statements, tax filings, bank accounts, or litigation history — those require separate searches or paid services.
Every state runs its own portal with its own quirks — different agency, different filing cycle, different definition of "good standing." These are the states people search most often, with what each one actually gives you.
| State | Agency of record | Cost | What makes it different |
|---|---|---|---|
| Florida | Division of Corporations (Sunbiz) | Free | Officer roster, registered agent address, scanned Articles, and every annual report by year. Annual reports are due May 1. |
| Texas | Secretary of State (SOSDirect) + Comptroller | Comptroller search free; SOSDirect fees apply | Use the Comptroller's Taxable Entity Search to confirm franchise-tax good standing; SOSDirect for formation documents and assumed names. |
| New York | Department of State, Division of Corporations | Free | Returns DOS ID, jurisdiction, service-of-process address, and county. New York LLCs file biennial statements, not annual ones. |
| Connecticut | Secretary of the State — Business One Stop | Free | Search by name, business ID, or filing number. Annual reports are required every year for both LLCs and corporations. |
| California | Secretary of State — BizFile Online | Free | Watch for "FTB Suspended" — a suspension by the Franchise Tax Board strips the entity's right to contract until revived. |
| Delaware | Division of Corporations (ICIS) | Name search free; status report has a fee | The free search confirms existence and registered agent only; officers are not on file in Delaware. |
| Nevada | Secretary of State — SilverFlume | Free | Lists managers, members of record, and the annual list filing status — useful when tracing holding structures. |
| Illinois | Secretary of State — Business Services | Free | Separate LLC and corporation search interfaces; corporate records show president and secretary of record. |
Every other state is listed in the full directory below, each with a direct link to its official portal.
A state entity record is a filing history, not a profile. Once you pull a record, you are reading four things: identity, standing, agent, and paper trail.
What you will not get: revenue, tax filings, bank accounts, litigation history, or true beneficial ownership. For encumbrances against a company's assets, run a UCC lien search in the same state, and for filings against public companies check federal records such as SEC EDGAR and the bankruptcy dockets.
Every registered entity must name a registered agent — a person or company with a physical address in the state authorized to accept service of process. That single field is the most useful piece of data on a state entity record, because most portals let you search it in both directions. Search forward from a company name to find its agent, or search backward from an agent's name to list every entity that agent represents. Investigators use the reverse search to map related companies sharing an owner, a management firm, or a single address.
Two cautions. First, an agent address is a service address, not necessarily an operating location — thousands of Delaware and Nevada entities list the same commercial agent suite, so a shared address alone proves nothing. Second, a stale agent is a live compliance risk: when an agent resigns and is not replaced, the state eventually administratively dissolves the entity, and lawsuits can proceed on substituted service the owners never see. If you are choosing an agent for your own company rather than researching someone else's, our comparison of the best registered agent services covers pricing, multi-state coverage, and mail forwarding, and the registered agent directory explains the state-by-state requirements.
Click any state to see the portal details and direct link.
Whether the entity you found is active, or forfeited and dissolved and needs to be reinstated, staying compliant going forward means keeping a registered agent, filing annual reports on time, and maintaining active status with the state. We recommend Harbor Compliance for ongoing compliance management.
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Searchadex is built and maintained by an editorial team with hands-on experience in commercial lending, underwriting, and regulatory compliance — the same professionals who use these portals daily for real due diligence work. We know which Secretary of State databases are slow, which require exact-name matching, and which have undocumented quirks (like California's "Agent for Service of Process" terminology or Delaware's separate File Number search). Every portal link is hand-verified before publication, and we update broken URLs within 48 hours of being reported. We never resell records, never charge fees, and never link to third-party aggregators that obscure the original source. The goal is simple: if a government portal exists for a public record, you should be able to find it here in one click — no paywalls, no upsells, no middlemen.