Maryland Secretary of State Business Search

The state of Maryland makes it relatively simple to find business information typically registered with the Secretary of State, but in Maryland you won't find it through that office. Below we'll walk through the steps for finding this information, and show you some additional resources you might not know about.

There are any number of reasons you might need information on a business. It's absolutely critical when performing due diligence and for Know Your Client (KYC) purposes. If you're only performing these kinds of searches occasionally, Maryland's search portal allows you to find the information 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.

As mentioned above, you'll find Maryland's Business Express search portal - operated by the Maryland Department of Assessments & Taxation rather than the Secretary of State's office - linked above. The landing page looks like this:

The search interface is simple and basic. You can only choose to search by the business name or the Department ID number. There are no options to limit your search any further.

When you perform the search, you'll be directed to the results page, which looks like this:

The results page displays all matching results, in alphabetical order by company name, with no ability to sort the information differently.

As you can see, the page offers very little information on the business records - only the name, the Department ID number, and the current status of the business.

Clicking on a business name brings you to the details page for that business.

The information found on the General Information tab could best be described as sparse. The only additional information on this page is the name and contact information for the owner and the business, and the expiry date of its registration.

On the 'Filing History' tab, you'll find any documents filed by the business - Annual Reports, for example, and name registrations.

The 'eye' icon suggests that you would be able to preview the document it references, but that's not the case. Clicking on the icon, or the document name, opens a dialogue to save it as a PDF.

You can order certified copies of these documents through the website as well, at a cost of $20 each.

Maryland offers only a very limited amount of business information, and given the lack of search filters, sifting through the results can be time consuming. If you need to search for hundreds - or even thousands - of these records each month, this would quickly consume a lot of time. Furthermore, Secretary of State data is different from one state to another, so combining and integrating data from multiple states is complex.