California Secretary of State Business Search: Fees, API & Bulk Data

California's business register is free, unusually deep, and widely misdescribed. You can search every corporation, limited liability company and limited partnership on record, download the filed documents, and read four separate standing indicators without paying anything or creating an account.

What almost no guide gets right is the shape of what you are looking at. California publishes a great deal about how a company behaves and nothing at all about who owns it. It publishes officer data that most write-ups claim it withholds. And the most repeated claim about California ownership disclosure in 2026 — that it began on 1 January — is untrue.

This guide covers how the search actually works, what the record contains, what suspension really does to a counterparty, what it all costs, and the two access routes — bulk orders and an official API — that most write-ups miss. Every figure and fee below traces to the Secretary of State, the Franchise Tax Board, the California Legislature or the Revenue and Taxation Code.

The number everyone quotes is counting the wrong thing

Vendor pages routinely describe bizfile as holding “over 17 million business entity records.” The Secretary of State's own wording, on its Business Entities Records Request page, is different: over 17 million corporate, limited liability company and limited partnership images.

Images, not entities. Every amendment, Statement of Information, merger, conversion and termination is a separate scanned document, and a company trading for twenty years may account for dozens of them.

California does not publish a count of active entities at all. That is worth sitting with, because Texas does — its Secretary of State announced 2,928,688 actively registered entities as of 1 January 2025, to the digit. California, routinely assumed to be the largest state register in the country, publishes no equivalent figure.

How many companies, and which way is it moving?

The Secretary of State will not tell you how many entities are on the register. It will, however, tell the Legislature how many documents it has handled — every month, cumulatively, since 1 May 2013, in its reports to the Joint Legislative Budget Committee.

Difference two of those reports twelve months apart and you get an annual throughput figure for the largest business register in the United States. As far as we can tell, nobody publishes this series. Here it is.

Cumulative totals since 1 May 2013, as reported by the California Secretary of State to the Department of Finance and the Joint Legislative Budget Committee. The 2020 report is omitted here, so the 2019 to 2021 gap covers 24 months.

Filing activity peaked in the year to May 2023 at 952,823 documents, then fell 14.4% and 5.2% in the two years that followed — down almost a fifth from the peak. Read that as registry activity, not company growth: the office does not break its numbers down by filing type, so a formation, an amendment and a termination each count once.

Two things sit alongside that series and are worth knowing.

The backlog is gone. Average business entity processing time was 35 days in May 2021 and 31 days in May 2022, when the office was moving business entity filings onto bizfile. It was 5 days by May 2023, 8 days in May 2024 after budget-driven overtime cuts, and 4 days by May 2025. Today's published schedule has online submissions reviewed the next business day. Roughly 31,000 to 37,500 filings a year still pay $350 to $750 to skip the queue anyway.

The series has stopped. The most recent report published on the Secretary of State's site covers May 2025. As of 26 July 2026, nothing more recent has appeared. If you need current California volume data, this is the point at which the public record runs out.

And how many have closed?

California does not publish that figure either — and unlike the volume question, you cannot reconstruct it, because of how the state handles a company that simply stops.

Nothing obliges a California entity to file anything when it ceases trading. It misses a Statement of Information or an $800 tax payment, is suspended, and then sits there. The Franchise Tax Board can begin administrative termination only after 60 continuous months of suspension — 48 for nonprofits — and the entity then has 60 days to object or return to active status before it is cancelled, dissolved or surrendered.

The only public artefact on the closure side is the Secretary of State's pending administrative termination notice, posted for 60 days at a time and broken out by entity type. It is a snapshot, not a series: at the time of writing no notice was posted for any of the three categories. Past batches have varied enormously — 6,564 nonprofit dissolution notices went out in January 2019, and 97 in January 2021.

How the search actually works

The portal is bizfile Online, at bizfileonline.sos.ca.gov/search/business. It covers corporations, LLCs and limited partnerships. Registered general partnerships and limited liability partnerships are not fully covered by the online search — the Secretary of State requires those to be requested from its Sacramento office on a records order form. If a counterparty is an LLP, the online search will not settle it.

1. Start with the number, not the name. Names change, and California allows similar names across different entity types. The entity number does not move. For entities registered since the numbering change, include the leading B.
2. Switch to Advanced when the name is common. The default search matches your terms anywhere in the name and returns a capped set of closest matches, so a generic name may never surface the entity you want. Advanced Search adds a match type, entity type, status and initial filing date range.
3. Read the results table before opening anything. It carries entity name, entity number, initial filing date, status, entity type, jurisdiction of formation and agent for service of process — enough to disambiguate most look-alikes without a single click.
4. Open the detail record for standing. This is where California differs from every other large state: four separate standing indicators, not one status.
5. Open the filed image, not just the summary. The Statement of Information as filed carries fields the summary view does not surface, including the labour judgment attestation covered below. Uncertified copies are free and need no account.
6. Use the separate Publicly Traded Disclosure Search if the entity is a public filer. It is a different search, not a field on the main record.

One capability California does not give you: a reverse agent search. The agent for service of process appears on every record and as a results column, but there is no documented way to ask the portal which other entities share a given agent. That question — the fastest route to a shell cluster — needs a normalised copy of the data, not the portal.

What the California record actually contains

The Secretary of State publishes an explicit list of the fields available through the free search, and a second list of what is not made of record. Both are worth reading literally, because the second is where due diligence assumptions break.

Both lists are the Secretary of State's own, from its Business Entities Records Request page, retrieved 26 July 2026.

Note what this settles. Several published guides state that California does not show officers or directors. It does — they are listed by the Secretary of State among the fields available in the free search, drawn from the Statement of Information. What California withholds is ownership. Officers and owners answer different questions, and conflating them is the root of most confusion about this registry.

“Active” is not the same as good standing

California is one of very few states that publishes standing from more than one agency, and it is genuinely useful once you know to look. The Secretary of State records whether the entity exists and is registered. The Franchise Tax Board records whether it has paid what it owes and filed what it must.

Every LLC, corporation, limited partnership and limited liability partnership formed in California or doing business there owes the Franchise Tax Board an $800 minimum annual tax, subject to narrow first-year exceptions. LLCs owe a further fee once California-source total income passes $250,000 — $900 at the lowest tier, rising to $11,790 above $5 million. None of that detail appears in the Secretary of State record. Only the standing flag does.

Failing to file the Statement of Information triggers the same machinery from the other direction: a $250 penalty against for-profit entities, assessed by the Franchise Tax Board, and suspension or forfeiture if the delinquency continues.

What suspension actually does

This is the part that turns a data field into exposure, and it is why the Franchise Tax Board indicator deserves more weight than the top-line status.

Revivor works retroactively for most purposes, but not all: contract voidability survives unless the entity separately applies for relief. So a suspension that has already been cured can leave a live contractual question behind it. Checking status at the moment of signing is not paperwork — it is the difference between an enforceable agreement and an optional one.

The labour judgment field almost nobody reads

Since 1 January 2022, under AB 3075, every Statement of Information filed by a California corporation or LLC must state whether any officer or director — or any member or manager, for an LLC — has an outstanding final judgment from the Division of Labor Standards Enforcement or a court for violating a wage order or the Labor Code.

It is self-attested and the Secretary of State does not verify it. But it is a structured adverse signal, on the face of a public filing, in one of the largest business registries in the country, and very few verification workflows look at it. It sits on the filed form — which is why step five above matters.

The same statute added Labor Code section 200.3, making a successor liable for wages, damages and penalties owed by a judgment debtor where the successor uses substantially the same facilities, workforce or controlling owners. For vendor onboarding or acquisition diligence in California, the disclosure field and the successor liability rule belong in the same check.

Ownership: what California does not have, and the claim that keeps circulating

There is no public beneficial ownership record in California. Not in bizfile, not anywhere else in state government.

What makes this worth spelling out is how much published guidance says the opposite. Senate Bill 1201 would have required corporations and LLCs to name their beneficial owners — anyone holding 25% or more of the equity, or exercising substantial control — on their Statements of Information, with the Secretary of State publishing it. It passed the State Senate 23–10 on 21 May 2024, went to the Assembly, and both scheduled committee hearings, on 17 June and 1 July, were cancelled at the author's request. The bill died with the 2023–24 session.

It was the fourth attempt. An earlier bill in 2021 never received a hearing, and SB 594 — substantively identical to SB 1201, per the Senate Judiciary Committee's own analysis — died in Senate Appropriations in 2023. The recurring obstacle has been cost: the Secretary of State put implementation in the millions.

One more point from the legislative record, and it applies to every field on the register: the Secretary of State makes filings public but does not verify what is in them. That is the Senate Judiciary Committee's own description of current law. Treat the California record as an authoritative statement of what was filed — not of what is true.

How current is any of it?

California publishes quickly. On the Secretary of State's processing schedule, last updated 24 July 2026, documents submitted online were being reviewed the following business day, with mail submissions three to four days behind. By state registry standards that is excellent.

Currency of content is a different matter. Officer, manager and address data only changes when a Statement of Information is filed. Corporations file annually; LLCs every two years, within a six-month window keyed to the anniversary month of formation.

An amended statement can be filed at any time between windows, at no fee. It is also entirely voluntary, and most entities do not bother. So a California LLC record can be fully compliant, show a green standing indicator, and name a manager who left twenty-three months ago.

This is the structural problem we mapped across the rest of the country in the state-by-state guide to US Secretary of State registries, and it is why monitoring beats point-in-time lookup for anything carrying risk.

A real certificate, read closely

Below is an actual California Certificate of Status, filed into a public California Public Utilities Commission docket in November 2025. It is worth reading field by field, because it demonstrates three things at once.

First, the entity number. It is the new B-prefixed format, on an entity registered in March 2025 — confirmation that the change is already flowing through live records and certificates.

Second, “Formed in: Arizona.” This is a foreign LLC qualified to transact business in California. The California file confirms it is registered and in standing; the articles, the operating agreement and the entity's actual constitutional documents are in Arizona. A California-only check on this counterparty would answer almost nothing about how it is structured.

Third, the certificate's own caveats, in the Secretary of State's words: it speaks to status as of the date of the certificate, does not reflect documents pending review, and the office holds no information about the entity's financial condition, licences or business practices. A Certificate of Status is proof of registration and nothing else.

One feature worth knowing: every certificate carries a certificate number, and bizfile has a Certification Verification Search that checks whether a given number was genuinely issued. If a counterparty hands you a Certificate of Status, you can verify it rather than take it on trust.

What California charges

Searching and reading cost nothing. Fees begin at certification and at speed.

Fees from the California Secretary of State Business Entities Fee Schedule. Franchise tax and LLC fees are separate and owed to the Franchise Tax Board, not the Secretary of State.

Getting California at scale: bulk and API

Two things about California are consistently under-reported, and both matter if you are building rather than looking things up.

An official API actually exists

The Secretary of State runs an API management portal at calicodev.sos.ca.gov, built on Azure API Management, where developers register an account and obtain a subscription key. That puts California in a very small group of states offering any official programmatic access at all.

The honest caveat: the product catalogue sits behind sign-in. Coverage, rate limits, refresh cadence and terms of use are not published anywhere public, so you cannot evaluate the API before registering for it. That is a real procurement constraint, and the same one that appears in most jurisdictions with gated registry access — we mapped the pattern globally in business registry API access by country.

Bulk orders run through bizfile

Bulk data is ordered through bizfile Online, under the business entity and UCC bulk orders section. Expect flat files rather than a queryable service, with images delivered as a separate product from the text data, and expect to build ingestion and normalisation yourself.

One thing to verify directly with the office: the bulk fee schedule published on the Secretary of State's site covers UCC products. Business entity bulk pricing is not set out on the same schedule, and several third-party guides quote the UCC figures as though they applied to company data. Confirm the current price before budgeting against it.

Whether you run this yourself or buy it is the standard build-versus-buy question, and California is the state where building looks most tempting because the API exists. We set out the trade-offs in live registry API versus stored registry data.

The Delaware problem inside the California file

Look again at the jurisdiction field. California's register carries two very different populations: entities formed in California, and entities formed elsewhere and qualified to transact business there. For the second group — which includes a large share of the venture-backed, private-equity-owned and multi-state businesses an enterprise buyer actually cares about — California holds a registration record and little else.

The certificate above is the small version of this: an Arizona LLC, qualified in California. The consequential version is Delaware. If the jurisdiction field says Delaware, the entity's charter documents, corporate history and governing law sit in Delaware's Division of Corporations, where the free record is thinner than California's and most detail sits behind a paywall.

Practically: read the jurisdiction field before you read anything else. It tells you whether the California file is the primary record or a secondary one, and that determines whether your check is nearly finished or has barely started.

California against the other large registries

The five biggest state registers behave differently enough that a workflow tuned to one will fail on the others.

Compiled from each state's Secretary of State or equivalent; the California column was verified against Secretary of State sources on 26 July 2026. Full detail in our guides to Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

The pattern worth noticing: California is the most generous of the five on what it publishes for free, and the only one that surfaces tax-authority standing on the same page as registration status. It is also, alongside Delaware, one of the two where the most consequential entities are frequently registered somewhere else.

One company, four public systems

A complete picture of a California counterparty is an assembly job, not a lookup. The Secretary of State answers one question well and is silent on the rest.

The fictitious business name layer catches people out most often. California trading names are filed at county level, not with the state, so the name on the invoice frequently will not appear anywhere in the state register. Search the legal name and the entity number, then check the county for the trading name.

A California verification checklist

1. Search by entity number, not by name. Include the leading B for entities registered since the numbering change.
2. Use Advanced Search for common names. The default match is broad and the result set is capped, so the entity you want may not appear at all.
3. Read the jurisdiction field first. If it is not California, the California file is a secondary record and the primary one is elsewhere.
4. Read all four standing indicators, not the top-line status. A Franchise Tax Board suspension makes contracts voidable at the other party's option.
5. Check status at the moment of signing, not only at onboarding. Voidability attaches to contracts made during the suspension period.
6. Check the Statement of Information date. Within twelve months for a corporation, twenty-four for an LLC — and treat anything near the limit as unverified.
7. Open the filed Statement of Information image. The labour judgment attestation is on the form, not in the summary view.
8. Verify any Certificate of Status handed to you, using its certificate number in the Certification Verification Search.
9. Do not expect ownership. Obtain it from the counterparty, and document how you obtained it.
10. Check the county for the fictitious business name, and the relevant board for licensing. Neither is state-registry data.
11. Confirm entity type before relying on the portal at all. Limited liability partnerships and general partnerships are not fully covered by the online search.
12. Do not read a live record as a live business. An entity that stopped trading five years ago can still be listed, suspended, and not yet terminated.
13. Monitor rather than re-check. Suspension, forfeiture and agent resignation all happen between review cycles.

If you are building this into a repeatable process rather than doing it case by case, the mechanics generalise: see our guide to what KYB actually requires.

Frequently asked questions