Virginia State Corporation Commission

Virginia Business Entity Search

Last updated October 15, 2026. Register data is refreshed nightly.

Virginia's register is at cis.scc.virginia.gov, run by the State Corporation Commission, not a Secretary of State. Virginia is one of a handful of states where an independent commission holds the companies.

You have to accept the cookie notice

Virginia will not show you anything until you accept it, and rejecting it returns you to the same notice.

That is worth saying plainly because it looks like the site is broken. It is not: there is no path through without accepting.

The 500 trap

A broad search warns you it has found more than 500 matches and offers to show you the first 500.

Take that offer and the name you are checking may be sitting in the part you did not see. The offer is framed as helpful and it quietly limits the answer. Narrow the search instead (by a distinctive word, not by a common one) so the result set is genuinely complete rather than truncated.

Illinois does the same thing and says so in a banner; Hawaii cuts at 300 silently. Virginia at least asks first.

It ignores punctuation

The match strips it, so a search for Acme finds A.C.M.E. and similar. That is the state showing you how it reads names: the same standard Ohio, Massachusetts and Georgia apply, and the same one the Commission will apply to your filing.

The results grid is one of the fullest

Virginia puts a lot in the row: the entity ID, the entity name, the name type, the entity type, whether it is a series LLC, the principal office address, the registered agent, and the status.

Series-LLC status in a results grid is rare. Iowa and Illinois give series their own tab on the record, but you have to open it. Virginia flags it before you click.

Open a record and you get the formation date, the status and the reason for it, the status date, the Virginia qualification date, the period of duration, an industry code, and the annual report due date.

Who decides

Filings are recorded; what the Commonwealth accepts is judged by the State Corporation Commission on examination, under the Virginia Limited Liability Company Act, Va. Code Title 13.1, Chapter 12.

Before you rely on it

Accept the cookie notice. There is no way round it.

Do not take the first-500 offer on a name that matters. Narrow instead.

Read the reason beside the status, not just the status.

Check the series-LLC column if that is relevant to you.

Virginia filing facts

The annual registration is due by the last day of the month in which the LLC was formed, every year after the year of formation. That is the anniversary arrangement New Jersey and Massachusetts use rather than a fixed statewide date, which means every company has its own deadline and nobody can remind you by season.

At $100 to form and $50 a year Virginia is mid-table on both: more than Montana's $35, less than Massachusetts's $500; the same annual as Rhode Island's report before Rhode Island's $400 tax is added.

We are not quoting a name reservation fee; it is not on the material we verified.

150,420 applications over the 52 weeks to 26 September 2026, 602 a business day, up 13.6%, ranking 14th of 51.

What the register will not tell you

Virginia has 59,005 live registered marks, and the vocabulary is institutional rather than commercial:

Association appears in 1,495 marks, nearly as many as the state's own name. Add institute, foundation and management and the pattern is unmistakable: this is the Washington DC orbit spilling across the river.

The District's own register shows the same words harder (association at 15x there against 6x here), but Virginia has the volume. Between them, the two jurisdictions hold the national trade-body vocabulary.

Filing is unusually distributed: Richmond 9.6%, Alexandria 8.4%, Arlington 8.3%. Three centers within a point and a half of each other, which no other state in this set manages: the northern suburbs and the capital pulling roughly even.

If you are naming an association, institute or foundation in Virginia, expect company. Anything else is open.

What the Virginia portal looks like

Captured from the live register. Personal names and addresses are blacked out; everything else is as the state publishes it.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Virginia State Corporation Commission business services

Business registrations in Virginia are held by the Virginia State Corporation Commission, 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.

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 Virginia business entity searches

How do I check if an LLC exists in Virginia?

Search the Virginia business register by name using the search on this page, or directly on the state's own portal. If a matching record comes back, the entity exists and its status line tells you whether it is active. No match means no entity is registered under that name today.

How do I verify a company is registered in Virginia?

Search the name, then open the record rather than reading the results line. You get formation date, status and the reason for it, status date, Virginia qualification date and period of duration. 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 Virginia business name is approved?

Not on its own. A no-match result means the name is not on the Virginia register today, which is a preliminary answer rather than approval: Virginia State Corporation Commission decides when it reviews the filing. Worth knowing about Virginia in particular: a broad search warns you when it has more than 500 matches and offers to show only the first 500. Take that offer and the name you are checking may be sitting in the 1,400 it did not show you. Searching Smith returns 1,914.

Can I look up who owns a business in Virginia?

The Virginia 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 Virginia?

Virginia State Corporation Commission charges $100 to file the Articles of Organization, which is the document that forms the company, and currently takes 24 hours online to process. Reserving a name beforehand is a separate and smaller fee. Confirm the figure with the state before you file: schedules move.

Sources

• Virginia business entity search, the official register this page queries.
• Filing fees and processing times: Virginia State Corporation Commission: Virginia Limited Liability Companies forms and fees, and Annual Registration…, verified 2026-09-10. Current schedules are published by the Virginia State Corporation Commission.
• 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.
• Office contact details: compiled from published directories and not yet confirmed against the contact page published by the Virginia State Corporation Commission. Telephone the office before relying on an address.
• Naming and reporting rules: Virginia State Corporation Commission: Virginia Limited Liability Companies forms and fees, and Annual Registration Fees FAQ.
• Naming statute: Va. Code 13.1-1012, published by the state.
• State seal: public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.