Washington Secretary of State
Washington Business Entity Search
Last updated . Register data is refreshed nightly.
Check whether a business name is already on file with the Washington Secretary of State. Free, no account, all entity types.
Washington Business Entity Search
Search the state's official business records.
Washington's register is searchable free at ccfs.sos.wa.gov, the Corporations and Charities Filing System, run by the Secretary of State. No account needed.
The results page does work the other states make you click for
Most registers give you a list of names and make you open each one to find out anything. Washington puts the substance in the grid: business name, UBI number, business type, the full principal office address, the registered agent's name, and status, all in the row.
That changes how you use it. You can scan a page of results for a particular registered agent, or spot every company at the same address, without opening a single record. In Ohio or Hawaii that is one click per result.
The UBI is worth knowing: a Unified Business Identifier, nine digits, shared across Washington state agencies. It is the number that ties a company's Secretary of State record to its other state registrations.
Opening a record, and the part below the fold
The record gives you the name, UBI, business type and status, the principal office street and mailing addresses, formation or registration date, expiration date, an inactive date where one applies, jurisdiction, period of duration and nature of business. Then registered agent information with both a street and a mailing address.
Then, further down, Governors.
That is Washington's word for the members and managers, the people who run the company. The table gives title, governor type, entity name where a governor is itself a company, and first and last name.
The trap is that it is empty on a dissolved record. Open one of the many inactive Acmes, see a blank Governors table, and it is natural to conclude Washington does not publish ownership. It does. Open an active company and the governors are listed.
The buttons at the bottom are the point
Four of them, and they are easy to scroll past: Filing History, Name History, Print, and Return to Business Search.
Filing History is the one to use. It lists a filing number, a filing date stamped to the second, an effective date, the filing type (certificate of formation, certificate of withdrawal, and so on), and against each a View Documents link.
Those documents are free. Washington sits with Ohio and Iowa on that, against Delaware and Hawaii, which charge for the same thing.
A note on the Cloudflare box
A Cloudflare Turnstile widget runs on the record pages and reports Success in the corner when it has passed. On an ordinary browser it passes without asking you to do anything. If a record seems to hang, that is usually what is happening.
Finding out what a filing costs is genuinely hard
This one is worth spelling out, because Washington is the only state we have looked at where the fee is not written down anywhere obvious.
Go to the Secretary of State's Fee Schedules & Priority Services page. Open the section headed Limited Liability Companies. The entire content is one sentence:
All LLC fees are outlined in RCW 25.15.
Follow that through and you reach RCW 23.95.260, which provides that the Secretary of State shall adopt rules setting the fees. In other words, the statute does not state a fee either. It delegates the question to administrative rule, so the actual dollar figures live in the Washington Administrative Code.
The fee page points at the statute; the statute points at the rules. Neither prints a number.
Two things the statute does settle, and they are useful:
Some filings are free. RCW 23.95.260(2) provides there is no fee for a registered agent's consent to act or statement of resignation, for articles of dissolution, for certificates of judicial dissolution, for statements of withdrawal, or for an annual report submitted together with the annual license fee.
Fee rises are capped by law. RCW 23.95.260(4) allows fees to be adjusted by rule only by an amount not exceeding the average biennial increase in the cost of providing the service, worked out in a biennial cost study. Most states can raise a filing fee by whatever the legislature decides. Washington has written itself a brake.
Who decides, and on what
Nothing on the results screen is a ruling. Acceptance is a decision the Corporations Division makes when the filing lands, under the Washington Limited Liability Company Act, RCW Chapter 25.15.
Worth remembering here in particular, because the grid is so informative that it feels more authoritative than it is.
Before you rely on it
Use the grid. The agent and the full address are already in front of you.
Scroll to Governors, and open an active company if you want to see who runs it. An empty table on a dissolved record means nothing.
Open Filing History rather than ordering anything. The documents are free.
Do not trust a fee you read on a third-party site. Figures of $200 to form and $60 a year circulate widely and do not match the state's own current material.
Washington filing facts
| Filing | Fee |
|---|---|
| Certificate of Formation | $180.00 |
| Annual Report | $70.00 |
| Initial Report | $10.00 |
| Amended Annual Report | $10.00 |
| Delinquent Annual Report | $95.00 |
| Name Reservation | $30.00 |
| Reinstatement | $140.00 plus all missed annual report fees |
| Expedited service | $100.00 on top of the filing fee |
A caution on the first two figures. They come from the state's own LLC filing resource page rather than from a fee table, because as set out above Washington does not publish one. We have not read the governing administrative rule. Confirm both with the Secretary of State before relying on them.
Busy, and going backwards
118,350 applications landed in the 52 weeks to 26 September 2026, roughly 473 every business day. By volume that ranks Washington 16th of 51, one of the busier states in the country.
The direction runs the other way. Year on year the rate is down 19.9%, and only three states are falling at all: Washington, then Oregon and Hawaii, neither of those two worse than minus 3%.
So Washington is not merely the steepest decline in the country, it is the only severe one, in a year when Kentucky grew 40%, Alaska 35% and Mississippi 33%.
What the register will not tell you
Trademarks. Washington has 54,823 live registered marks, and two Seattle companies dominate the words in them:
| word | live marks | times more common than nationally |
|---|---|---|
| starbucks | 417 | 77x |
| seattle | 849 | 64x |
| amazon | 660 | 51x |
| northwest | 560 | 35x |
| washington | 493 | 16x |
| pacific | 516 | 7x |
| coffee | 894 | 4x |
Starbucks and Amazon are each registered at fifty to eighty times the national rate, which is what a single headquartered company does to a state's register. Coffee at four times normal, with 894 live marks, is the same story told sideways.
Seattle accounts for 30.7% of all Washington marks, Bellevue 7.4% and Redmond 4.7%, so nearly half the state's trademark activity sits in three adjacent cities on the same side of Lake Washington.
If you are naming a Washington business around northwest, pacific, coffee or the city itself, the ground is crowded. Check the federal register before you commit.
What the Washington portal looks like
Captured from the live register. Personal names and addresses are blacked out; everything else is as the state publishes it.
Washington Secretary of State business services
Business registrations in Washington are held by the Washington 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 | ccfs.sos.wa.gov |
|---|---|
| Phone | (360) 725-0377 |
| Office hours | 8:00 a.m.-4:00 p.m. |
| LLC filing fee | $180 |
| Processing | 5-10 business days |
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 Washington business entity searches
How do I check if an LLC exists in Washington?
Search the name on this page or on the state's own portal. What Washington does by default is worth knowing before you read the result: no word-match toggle offered on the advanced search. 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 Washington?
Search the name, then open the record rather than reading the results line. Business Information: name, UBI number, business type, status, principal office street and mailing address, formation or registration date, expiration date, inactive date where one applies, jurisdiction, period of duration and…. 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 Washington business name is approved?
Not on its own. A no-match result means the name is not on the Washington register today, which is a preliminary answer rather than approval: Washington Secretary of State decides when it reviews the filing. Worth knowing about Washington in particular: the login panel is the first thing you see and it is not for you. Scroll past it to Corporation Search. Annual reports can also be filed without logging in, which is signposted on the same page.
Can I look up who owns a business in Washington?
Washington lists members and managers in a Governors table on the record, though it is empty on a dissolved company and sits below the fold.
How much does it cost to register a business name in Washington?
Washington Secretary of State charges $180 to file the Certificate of Formation, which is the document that forms the company, and currently takes 5-10 business days to process. Reserving a name beforehand is a separate and smaller fee. Confirm the figure with the state before you file: schedules move.
Sources
- Washington business entity search, the official register this page queries.
- Filing fees and processing times: Washington Secretary of State, Fee Schedules & Priority Services, verified 2026-09-10. Current schedules are published by the Washington 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.
- Office contact details: Washington Secretary of State, confirmed against the office’s own contact page.
- Naming and reporting rules: Washington Secretary of State, Fee Schedules & Priority Services; formation fee from the LLC filing resource page.
- Naming statute: Rev. Code Wash. 23.95.300, published by the state.
- State seal: public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.