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California Secretary of State Business Search

Helpful California Facts

Cost to register

Starting at $40 for DBAs and $85 for LLCs and corporations. Annual reports cost $25.

How to find a business

You can find a business registered with California by searching here or on the California Secretary of State website.

Walkthrough of California Secretary of State Registry

Find our walkthrough here and a video walkthrough here.

Registry of cached businesses in California

Find them here.

Find the status definitions for California

Learn the definitions for all statuses here.

Fields Available

Entity Name

Status

Search By Address

Search By Person

State of Formation

Filing Date

Entity Type

Industry

Officer Information

Organization Documents

Entity Id

Agent Name

Agent Address

Physical Address

Mailing Address

Secretary of State URL

Phone Number

Email

Screenshot

UCC Liens

Tin Verification

Form 5500 Series Data

State outline of California

Frequently asked questions

How to Search on California Secretary of State Registry

California makes it relatively simple to look up business information through the office of the Secretary of State. Below we'll walk through the steps for doing this, and show you some additional resources you might not know about.

There are any number of reasons you might need this information. It's absolutely critical when performing due diligence and Know Your Client (KYC) purposes. If you're only performing these kinds of searches occasionally, the California Business Search portal allows you to find the data you're looking for quickly and easily. If you're searching records like these in high numbers, there are some tools you'll want to know about, but we'll come back to that in just a moment.

You can find California's Business Search portal by clicking linked above. The landing page looks like this:

California Secretary of State Business Search

At the moment, information for LLPs (Limited Liability Partnerships) and GPs (General Partnerships) in California aren't available online, but hard copies can be requested by mail.

The basic search function makes it easy: just type in all or part of the business name, and the 500 records most closely matching the search are displayed right away.

California Secretary of State Business Search Results

If the search produces too many records, you can use the advanced search function to narrow your results by several criteria - type of business, date of initial filing, and more.

California Secretary of State Advanced Search

In the table displaying all the results, you'll find the information organized in several columns:

California Secretary of State Business Search Results

Entity Information

This displays the official name, and the registration number, for each business. Clicking on the name opens a sidebar with some additional information, including more detailed contact information, the business's standing with the Secretary of State, the Franchise Tax Board, the Victims of Corporate Fraud Compensation Fund, and the standing of the Agent.

California Secretary of State Business Details

Initial Filing Date

In this column, you'll find the date the company initially filed with the office. These dates can range from within days of performing the search, back to the 1800's.

Status

This column shows whether the company's registration is still active, or inactive, in which case it gives the reason (Suspended, Terminated, Forfeited, Merged Out, etc.)

Entity Type

This shows the legal structure of the company - typically a Legacy Corporation or a Stock Corporation (as noted above, LLPs and GPs won't be shown in the results)

Formed In

Many companies doing business in California were started in other states. This column displays the state in which the business was first formed

Agent

In this column, you'll find the name for the business's agent of record. In many cases, this person is a principal in the company. By clicking on the company name to open the sidebar, you can find contact information for the Agent

If you still have a lot of records to sift through after applying filters, you can sort the data in the columns (A-Z, Z-A) by clicking on the two small arrows.

As you've seen, performing a search for a single company is relatively straightforward, and doesn't take a lot of time. If you need to search for hundreds - or even thousands - of these records each month, though, this task can quickly add up into hours of time. Furthermore, Secretary of State data is different from one state to another, so combining and integrating data from multiple states is complex.