North Carolina Secretary of State Business Search

You can find business information for companies in North Carolina through the office of the Secretary of State. The search functionality is fairly basic, but easy to use. Below we'll walk through how to use the service, and show you some additional resources you might not know about.

There are a number of reasons you might need this information. It's absolutely critical when performing due diligence and Know Your Client (KYC) purposes when you're onboarding new customers. If you're only performing these kinds of searches occasionally, the search portal offered by the North Carolina Secretary of State might be helpful to you. 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 the North Carolina SOS corporation search page linked above. When you arrive, you'll see a very basic search interface.

While the search page is clean and simple, there are almost no search filters available. You can only search by the company name, any assumed names, the ID number, or the names of Registered Agents or Officials.

The search results page returns 100 records at a time, arranged alphabetically.

You can quickly see whether the company is active or otherwise, and the structure of the company. The icons on each company record allow you to upload a PDF filing, order a document online, view document filings, print a pre-populated Annual Report form, or print an Amended Annual Report form. You can also add the company to an email alert list, in which case you'll be notified of any changes to the record. Some of these functions require you to create an account.

Clicking on a company name will take you to the business details page.

Here, you can see additional information about a company, such as names and contact information for Principals and Officials, filing dates, and the 'citizenship' of the company (foreign, in this case, means formed in another state or country).

The same functions that can be performed with the icons on the search results page are now available as links at the top of the business details page.

North Carolina offers a reasonable amount of business information at no cost, and with very simple search functionality. If you need to search for hundreds - or even thousands - of these records each month, however, 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.