US Company Register: How to Search State Registries and Verify American Companies (2026)

1. Why there is no US company register

Company law in the US is state law. A business incorporates in one state, not necessarily where it operates, and registers again as a "foreign" entity in each additional state where it does business. Every state runs its own registry, its own search portal, its own fee schedule and its own definition of what is public. There is no national company number: the closest thing, the federal EIN tax ID, has no public register at all.

The result is a three-layer system: state registries prove existence and good standing, SEC EDGAR holds full financials but only for public companies, and industry regulators (FDIC for banks, state insurance commissioners) leak financial data for regulated sectors. For the ordinary private business, no layer publishes revenue.

One more absence worth naming: beneficial ownership. The Corporate Transparency Act register is not public, and since 2025 US domestic entities are exempt from reporting to it, so a Delaware or Wyoming LLC can be effectively anonymous.

2. Searching Delaware, the state that matters most

Around two thirds of the Fortune 500 and some two million other entities are incorporated in Delaware, most operating elsewhere. Its search at icis.corp.delaware.gov is free, and it comes with a trap worth knowing.

1. Open the General Information Name Search

   Go to the Division of Corporations site and enter the entity name.

   

2. Mind the alphabetical trap

   Results are sorted alphabetically with no relevance or size ranking. Search "Amazon" and the first 50 results contain none of Jeff Bezos's entities, just every name starting with those letters, from AMAZON 1997 HOLDINGS to AMAZONBLEND.COM INC. Use the exact registered name ("Amazon.com, Inc.") or the file number. For mapping which entity in a group you actually need, a corporate-structure view beats the state search.

   

3. Open the entity record

   Free of charge you get the entity name, file number, incorporation date and state, entity type (LLC, corporation), and the registered agent with address, often The Corporation Trust Company at 1209 Orange St, Wilmington, the address shared by hundreds of thousands of entities.

   

4. Pay for depth if you need it

   A status report costs $10, a detailed report with officer and director names (where filed) $20, and a certificate of good standing $50. Shareholders appear nowhere at any price.

3. The other 49: state-by-state searches

Every state runs its own portal, and they vary wildly. Some are modern, some demand captchas and logins, some charge for any detail. These are the searches you will use most, with a direct free alternative for each:

All fifty states, structured the same way and searchable without captchas or per-search fees: US business search by state.

4. SEC EDGAR: where US financials actually live

For the roughly 800,000 entities that have ever registered with the SEC, EDGAR (sec.gov/edgar) is a gift: every 10-K annual report, quarterly 10-Q and 8-K event filing, free and full-text searchable. If the business is listed, you will find audited revenue, profit, segments and risk factors in more detail than any European register offers.

For private businesses, EDGAR offers one narrow window: Form D, the notice filed when raising capital under Regulation D. It reveals that a raise happened, the amount, and the officers, but never revenue. Beyond that, a private US business simply has no public financial trail, which is why US revenue data is modelled from other signals.

Working with EDGAR programmatically? It has free official APIs; our SEC EDGAR API page covers how they work and what they can and cannot return.

5. How to verify a US company: a practical checklist

1. Find the state of formation

   Ask for it, read it off a contract, or work backwards from where the business claims to be. Remember: formation state and operating state are usually different. Our free company lookup resolves this in one search across all states.

2. Confirm the entity in the state registry

   Match the exact legal name and file number, and check the status is active or in good standing. Search the exact registered name, because state searches rank nothing.

3. Check foreign qualifications

   A business operating in a state where it is not registered as a foreign entity is a flag in itself. Qualification filings also carry a real business address, unlike the registered agent.

4. Cross-check EDGAR

   Full financials if it is an SEC filer; Form D history if it raised private capital. Absence from EDGAR is normal for private businesses; presence tells you a lot.

5. For regulated sectors, ask the regulator

   Banks file with the FDIC and Federal Reserve, insurers with state commissioners, brokers with FINRA. Regulated industries publish what the company register never will.

6. Limitations of the official sources

Each state portal works for confirming one entity in that state. The structural limits:

• No financials, anywhere. Private businesses file no accounts with any public body, the deepest gap of any major economy, and the reason revenue must be modelled.
• Fifty portals, fifty formats. No shared identifier, no shared schema, paywalls and captchas in several states, and the same name free in fifty places.
• Search is literal. Alphabetical listings and exact-prefix matching, the Amazon problem, make name-based discovery unreliable.
• Ownership is dark. No public UBO register, shareholders in no state record, and registered agents masking real addresses.
• Group structures are invisible. Which of the 200 "Amazon" entities is the parent, and which the subsidiary you are contracting with, no state search will tell you.

Confirming one Delaware LLC exists takes two minutes. Anything past existence, whether revenue, structure or footprint, is where the official sources stop.

7. Access US company data programmatically

The SEC's EDGAR APIs are free and excellent for filers, see our SEC EDGAR API guide. The state registries are another story: no shared API, several states with no API at all, and the ones that exist returning fifty different schemas.

CompanyData maintains records for all 64,593,043 US businesses, sourced from the state registries, SEC filings and other official sources, resolved into one schema: state file numbers reconciled, group structures mapped, and revenue and employee figures as structured fields. The Company Data API serves them by name, state or address, with free trial credits to start, and the same request shape covers 200+ other countries.

GET /api/company/search?country=US&state=DE&name=Blue+Ridge+Logistics

{
  "name": "BLUE RIDGE LOGISTICS LLC",
  "legalForm": "Limited Liability Company",
  "state": "Delaware",
  "status": "Active",
  "naics": "484110 · General freight trucking",
  "employees": "50 to 100",
  "revenueRange": "$10M to $50M"
}

8. US vs other company registers

The US is the outlier on both axes: the most fragmented search and the least public financial data.