New York Secretary of State
New York Business Entity Search
Last updated . Register data is refreshed nightly.
Check whether a business name is already on file with the New York Secretary of State. Free, no account, all entity types.
New York Business Entity Search
Search the state's official business records.
New York's register is searchable free through the Department of State at apps.dos.ny.gov. No account needed.
The county column, and why it costs money
New York shows the county on every result. No other state does, and in New York it is not decoration.
A new LLC has to publish notice of its formation in two newspapers for six consecutive weeks, in the county where the office is located, and the county sets the price. Manhattan is the expensive one: the newspaper costs alone run into the high hundreds or thousands. A filing in a rural county can cost a fraction of that for the identical obligation.
So when you look at a New York record and see New York County rather than, say, Albany County, you are looking at a company that paid considerably more to exist. And if you are choosing where to put your own office, that column is the first thing to understand about the state.
The real cost of forming here
| Articles of Organization | $200.00 |
| Certificate of Publication | $50.00 |
| Newspaper advertising, six weeks in two papers | separate, and priced by county |
The $200 is the number everyone quotes. It is the smallest part.
The publication requirement adds the $50 certificate fee plus the advertising itself, which is not a state fee at all and does not appear on any schedule. In Manhattan the total commonly runs an order of magnitude above the filing fee.
Any source that tells you a New York LLC costs $200 has told you a third of the story.
Two statuses, and the one people miss
The record carries an Entity Status and a Statement Status, and they routinely disagree.
One Acme record reads Entity Status ACTIVE while its Statement Status reads PAST DUE, with a next biennial statement that fell due on 31 August 2022.
Entity status is whether the company exists. Statement status is whether it has kept up its filings. A company can be active and years behind, and the field that tells you sits lower on the page than the one that does not.
Read both. If you are checking a company you are about to deal with, the statement status is the more informative of the two.
Searching it
Four things to enter against: entity name, DOS ID, assumed name, or assumed name ID. Three match modes: Base Word, Contains or Begins With, and it starts on Begins With, so switch it.
Status filters cover all, active, inactive or suspended. Entity type is a set of checkboxes: corporation, LLC, limited partnership, limited liability partnership; you have to tick at least one before it will search.
Results give the name, the DOS ID, an assumed name ID where one applies, the status, the entity type, the date of first filing, and the county.
The record is built around service of process
Open an entity and you get the name, DOS ID, any foreign legal name and any fictitious name; the entity type and the section of law it was formed under; the date of initial DOS filing and its effective date; county and jurisdiction.
What follows reflects a New York peculiarity: the Department of State is itself the agent for service of process on every LLC, and the record is organized around where the Department forwards that service. The address held for that purpose is the one that matters, and it is not necessarily an address the company trades from.
Who decides
Filing under the New York Limited Liability Company Law is one thing; acceptance is another, and the Department of State decides it on examination. New York does something useful here that most states do not: the record cites the section of law the entity was formed under, so you can see the provision without going to look for it.
Before you rely on it
Switch off Begins With. Base Word and Contains both return more.
Tick an entity type, or the search will not run.
Read the Statement Status, not just the Entity Status. Active and years behind is a common combination here.
Look at the county before you conclude anything about cost.
New York filing facts
| Filing | Fee |
|---|---|
| Articles of Organization | $200.00 |
| Certificate of Publication | $50.00 |
| Biennial statement | $9.00, every two years |
The biennial statement is $9. That is the cheapest recurring state filing in the country by a wide margin: New Hampshire charges $100 a year, Washington $70, Wyoming a minimum of $60. Nine dollars every two years works out at four dollars and fifty cents a year to stay on the register.
Which makes the shape of New York's cost unusual: expensive to start, almost free to maintain, with the real expense sitting in a newspaper advertising requirement that is not a state fee and is priced by geography.
Volume matches the population: 323,220 applications in the 52 weeks to 26 September 2026, 1,293 every business day, up 10.0% on the year. New York ranks 4th of 51.
What the register will not tell you
New York has 276,866 live registered marks, the largest pool of any state by some distance, and the striking thing is how uncontested the words in them are:
| word | live marks | times more common than nationally |
|---|---|---|
| nyc | 1,712 | 12x |
| brooklyn | 1,722 | 11x |
| york | 6,212 | 10x |
| capital | 2,352 | 2x |
| city | 2,059 | 2x |
| music | 1,660 | 2x |
| collection | 1,446 | 2x |
| media | 1,238 | 2x |
Nothing runs above twelve times the national rate. Compare Wyoming, where the state's own name sits at 503x, or Hawaii at 438x.
That is what scale does. New York has so many marks, across so many industries, that no single word dominates: six thousand marks containing york is only ten times normal because the denominator is enormous. The crowding here is not in any particular word; it is in the sheer number of names already taken.
Filing is concentrated where you would expect: New York City 49.3%, Brooklyn 7.9%, then Rochester and Buffalo at barely over 1% each. Half the state's trademark activity happens in one city.
What the New York portal looks like
Captured from the live register. Personal names and addresses are blacked out; everything else is as the state publishes it.
New York Secretary of State business services
Business registrations in New York are held by the New York Secretary of State, which maintains the public register this page searches, accepts new filings, and issues the certificates a bank or a counterparty may ask you for. Contact them directly for anything that has to be official.
| Business entity search | apps.dos.ny.gov/publicInquiry |
|---|---|
| Phone | (518) 473-2492 |
| Address | New York Department of State, One Commerce Plaza, 99 Washington Avenue, Albany, NY 12231 |
| Office hours | 8:45 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. |
| LLC filing fee | $200 |
| Processing | 2-3 weeks |
The office handles registration, not disputes. If a name is already taken, they will tell you it is unavailable but not who holds it beyond what the public record shows, and they will not advise on whether your name infringes someone’s mark.
Common questions about New York business entity searches
How do I check if an LLC exists in New York?
Search the name on this page or on the state's own portal. What New York does by default is worth knowing before you read the result: beginsWith. A match means the entity is on file, and its status line tells you whether it is still active.
How do I verify a company is registered in New York?
Search the name, then open the record rather than reading the results line. You get entity name, DOS ID, any foreign legal name and any fictitious name, entity type and the section of law it was formed under, date of initial DOS filing and its effective date, county and jurisdiction and entity status,…. The status on the record is the one to trust: a dissolved company still appears in a search and still holds its name.
Does a clear search mean my New York business name is approved?
Not on its own. A no-match result means the name is not on the New York register today, which is a preliminary answer rather than approval: New York Secretary of State decides when it reviews the filing. Worth knowing about New York in particular: the biennial statement status is the field to read, and it is easy to miss. One Acme record shows Entity Status ACTIVE while its Statement Status reads PAST DUE with a next statement due date of 31 August 2022, four years ago. In New York a company can sit as Active indefinitely while being years behind on its filings, so Active here means less than it does elsewhere. Results also start at five rows a page.
Can I look up who owns a business in New York?
The New York register shows the registered agent and, depending on the filing type, officers or organizers. It does not list members or shareholders for every entity, so the register identifies who accepts legal service rather than who owns the company.
How much does it cost to register a business name in New York?
New York Secretary of State charges $200 to file the Articles of Organization, which is the document that forms the company, and currently takes 2-3 weeks to process. Reserving a name beforehand is a separate and smaller fee. Confirm the figure with the state before you file: schedules move.
Sources
- New York business entity search, the official register this page queries.
- Filing fees and processing times: New York Department of State: Articles of Organization page, Biennial Statements page, and Certificate of…, verified 2026-09-10. Current schedules are published by the New York Secretary of State.
- Formation activity: Census Bureau Business Formation Statistics, retrieved via FRED at the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis.
- Federal trademark data: United States Patent and Trademark Office, 3,374,058 live registrations cross-referenced against the state registers. Live excludes both abandoned applications and cancelled registrations.
- Register copy: bulk data published by data.ny.gov, last checked October 15, 2026.
- Office contact details: compiled from published directories and not yet confirmed against the contact page published by the New York Secretary of State. Telephone the office before relying on an address.
- Naming and reporting rules: New York Department of State: Articles of Organization page, Biennial Statements page, and Certificate of Publication page.
- Naming statute: N.Y. Ltd. Liab. Co. Law 204, published by the state.
- State seal: public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.