Florida Sunbiz Company Search: What Data Is Free, What's Paid, and What's Not Available (2026)

The Florida Division of Corporations — known publicly as Sunbiz — holds nearly 4 million active business entities, making it one of the largest state registries in the United States. Here's what's inside it, what's free, what isn't, and where the gaps are.

What Is the Florida Secretary of State Business Registry?

The Florida business registry is operated by the Florida Department of State, Division of Corporations. The Secretary of State is Cord Byrd. The division runs the public-facing portal Sunbiz.org and is the statewide filing authority for corporations, LLCs, partnerships, fictitious names (DBAs), trademarks, judgment liens, federal tax liens, UCC filings, and notary commissions.

According to the division's published figures, it maintains over 8 million records in total and processes more than 240 million filings, certifications, and inquiries each year.

Official Search Portal: search.sunbiz.org

How Many Companies Are Registered in Florida?

As of the last official quarterly update (3 April 2026), the Florida registry holds just under 4 million active business entities. LLCs account for the overwhelming majority — more than 7 out of every 10 registered entities in Florida today is an LLC.

New Filings Are Growing

Florida's registry has more than doubled in size over the past decade. New LLC filings alone have grown from about 200,000 per year in 2014 to over 560,000 in 2025 — a 2.8x increase. Corporations, by contrast, have been flat or slightly declining, which reflects a broader national shift away from C-corp structures for small businesses.

The 2025 total of 670,459 new filings was the second-highest on record, trailing only 2023's post-pandemic peak. For context, 2014's total was less than half that.

How to Search Florida Business Records

Sunbiz offers multiple ways to find a business. No registration or account is required.

Officer & Registered Agent Search: Find All Companies Linked to a Person

One of Sunbiz's most powerful features — and the single most common KYB workflow — is the officer and registered agent reverse lookup. Instead of searching for a company, you search for a person. The system returns every Florida entity they are tied to.

Use this when you need to:

• Build a risk profile on a counterparty. See the full list of companies a director, manager, or agent is involved with — including dissolved ones.
• Identify shell company clusters. Multiple entities sharing the same registered agent at the same address is a classic red flag.
• Screen a sales prospect. Understand whether the person you're selling to sits on other boards or runs related businesses.
• Detect straw management. The same nominee officer appearing across dozens of unrelated entities is a common obfuscation tactic.
• Serve legal process. Quickly find the current registered agent address for any Florida entity controlled by your target.

What Data Is Available in a Florida Company Record?

Every Sunbiz entity profile contains the following fields. Officer information is listed when the entity has filed it (required on annual reports), and all filed documents are available as free PDF downloads.

Florida Business Entity Status Types

Every business on Sunbiz is assigned a status that indicates its current standing. Status determines whether the entity can legally operate and obtain a Certificate of Status.

Separate Databases: Fictitious Names, General Partnerships & UCC

Not everything lives in the main corporate search. Florida runs several parallel databases under the Division of Corporations, and it's easy to miss an entity by searching only the main index. This is one of the most common mistakes in Florida KYB workflows.

Fictitious Names (DBAs)

Florida holds 727,725 active fictitious name (DBA) registrations. A Florida LLC or corporation can operate under a trading name that is completely different from its registered legal name, and that trading name only appears in the DBA database — not in the main entity search.

For KYB, this matters: if a customer tells you their business is called "Sunshine Roofing," the legal entity on the Sunbiz corporate record might be "Smith Holdings LLC" trading as Sunshine Roofing. You need to search the DBA database separately at search.sunbiz.org/Inquiry/CorporationSearch/ByFictitiousName to link the two.

DBA registrations are valid for 5 years and must be renewed by December 31 of the fifth year. Each DBA also requires a newspaper advertisement before registration — a quirk unique to Florida.

General Partnerships

Florida's 17,937 active general partnerships are filed in a separate index from corporations and LLCs. Unlike LLCs and corps, general partnerships are not mandatory to register with the state — registration is optional under Chapter 620 of Florida Statutes. That means many operating general partnerships do not appear in Sunbiz at all.

If you're screening a Florida partnership for compliance, the absence of a Sunbiz record does not mean the entity doesn't exist. You may need to corroborate via tax records, commercial filings, or direct inquiry.

UCC Financing Statements

The Florida Secured Transaction Registry (UCC filings) is maintained separately under Florida Statute Chapter 679. This database records security interests on business assets — essential for credit risk and collateral verification. Access is through floridaucc.com, not the main Sunbiz portal.

Judgment & Federal Tax Liens

Filed under the Judgment Lien Registry (Chapter 55, Florida Statutes) and Federal Tax Lien Registry. These are searchable through Sunbiz but in dedicated search paths, not the main entity search. They are critical for any risk-scoring workflow — an entity can look "Active" in the main search while carrying unresolved federal tax liens that only show in the lien registry.

What Data Is NOT Available in the Florida Registry

Sunbiz covers the legal filing record — but there's a lot it doesn't hold. This is where compliance and sales teams get caught out:

How Often Is the Florida Registry Updated?

Update cadence depends on how you access the data. The online search updates in near real-time, but the bulk data feeds are slower and have known gaps.

Annual reports filed online by credit card post within minutes. Paper filings and check payments are processed in the order received and can take days to weeks depending on backlog.

Historical & Dissolved Records: What Happens When a Company Closes

Florida retains records for every entity it has ever registered — dissolved, withdrawn, revoked, merged, or converted. Nothing is ever deleted. For investigators, compliance teams, and litigators, this is one of Sunbiz's quiet strengths.

Practical implications:

• Name reuse rules. An administratively dissolved name is held for 1 year under "INACT/UA" status — it cannot be reused. A voluntarily dissolved name is held for 120 days. After those windows, the name becomes available.
• Reinstatement timeline. A dissolved Florida entity can be reinstated for up to 10 years after dissolution. Beyond that, it's gone for good and a new filing is required.
• Litigation discovery. If you're researching a defunct Florida company for a lawsuit, the full filing history — including the identities of officers at the time of the conduct in question — is still there.
• Shell detection. Entities that cycle through dissolve → reinstate → dissolve are a red flag. Florida's retention of the full history makes the pattern visible.

Four Ways to Access Florida Company Data

Option 1: Online Search (Free)

The Sunbiz.org search portal is free, public, and requires no registration. It's ideal for one-off lookups and document downloads. It is not suitable for programmatic or bulk access — there is no official API, and automated scraping of the search portal violates its terms of use.

Option 2: Bulk Data Downloads (Free)

Florida publishes its full registry as free, downloadable files via SFTP. This is the only legitimate way to get the data in bulk.

(These are the official public credentials published by the Division of Corporations.)

Two types of files are available:

• Daily files — generated on work days, containing that day's new filings and events. Corporate files are named yyyymmddc.txt; corporate event files are yyyymmddce.txt.
• Quarterly files — full snapshots of all active records, generated in January, April, July, and October. The corporate quarterly file is split into 10 smaller files by document-number suffix (0–9).

Separate files exist for fictitious names, general partnerships, trademarks, federal tax liens, and lien debtors and secured parties.

Option 3: Official API

There is no official API. This is the most common question about Florida, and the answer is the same every time: the Division of Corporations does not publish a REST or GraphQL API. The only machine-readable access is through the SFTP bulk files.

Third-party providers — including Global Database — ingest those files, parse the fixed-width format, normalise the data, and expose it through APIs. If you need programmatic, real-time access to Florida company data, you are choosing between building that ingestion pipeline yourself or licensing it from a data provider.

Option 4: Individual Document Copies (Paid)

While the index data is free, certified copies and certificates carry small fees, paid through the Sunbiz e-file system:

Good to Know: Florida Filing Fees & Deadlines

Before working with Sunbiz data, it helps to understand the compliance calendar that drives most of the status changes you'll see in the feed. The chart below shows the standard filing and annual report fees by entity type.

• Annual Report due Jan 1 – May 1. All corporations, LLCs, LPs, and LLLPs must file between January 1 and May 1 each year.
• $400 late fee after May 1. Applies to all profit entities (not non-profits).
• Administrative dissolution in September. Entities that miss the deadline are administratively dissolved on the fourth Friday of September — this is why Florida's inactive count jumps sharply every autumn.
• Reinstatement available for up to 10 years. LLC reinstatement: $100 fee plus $138.75 per missed year. Corp reinstatement: $600 plus $150 per missed year.
• New corp filing: $70 ($35 filing + $35 registered agent).
• New LLC filing: $125.
• Fictitious Name (DBA) registration: $50, valid for 5 years.
• Online filing required for annual reports — paper filings are not accepted.
• Document images are free. Every filed document can be downloaded as a PDF at no charge.

Foreign Entities: Registering an Out-of-State Business in Florida

Florida hosts 74,105 active foreign corporations and 17,671 foreign LLCs — companies formed in another state or country that have registered to transact business in Florida. For compliance teams screening vendors, knowing how foreign qualification works matters because:

• A Delaware LLC doing business in Florida must qualify as a foreign entity. If it hasn't, it's operating unlawfully in Florida and cannot sue in Florida courts until qualified (§ 605.0904, Florida Statutes).
• Foreign entity filing fee: $125 for LLCs, $70 for corporations — same as domestic filings.
• Foreign name registration: $87.50 (separate from the entity filing).
• Certificate of Authority required. The foreign entity must provide a Certificate of Existence (or equivalent) from its home state dated within 90 days of filing.
• Annual reports apply. Foreign entities file the same annual report as domestic entities, between January 1 and May 1, with the same $400 late fee after May 1.
• Same registered agent requirement. Foreign entities must maintain a Florida registered agent with a physical Florida address — not just a P.O. box.

When you look up a foreign entity on Sunbiz, the profile will show the home state under "State/Country" and the entity's name in its home jurisdiction under "Cross Ref" — useful for reconciling corporate linkage across state lines.

The Corporate Transparency Act & FinCEN: What Changed in 2025

This is the single biggest misconception currently circulating about US state business registries, and it matters for anyone doing KYB or compliance on Florida entities.

Here's what the current rules actually say, based on the FinCEN Interim Final Rule published March 26, 2025:

What This Means for KYB Workflows

If your compliance workflow was designed around the original CTA scope (where most Florida LLCs would be reporting companies), it needs updating:

• Do not expect FinCEN BOI data for Florida-formed entities. None of the ~2.8M Florida LLCs are required to report. Anyone claiming to have FinCEN BOI for a domestic Florida LLC post-March 2025 is working from stale data.
• Foreign-formed entities registered in Florida are still in scope. This is a smaller but commercially important set — mostly international companies doing business in Florida.
• Beneficial ownership data is now harder to get in the US, not easier. Sunbiz never had UBO, and FinCEN no longer collects it from US-formed entities. For ownership chains, you're dependent on voluntary disclosures, litigation records, or third-party data enrichment.
• State-level BOI laws are emerging. New York's LLC Transparency Act became effective January 1, 2026, though currently limited to foreign-formed LLCs qualified in New York. Other states may follow. Florida has not enacted a state-level BOI requirement as of this writing.

For the most current rules, check the FinCEN BOI page directly at fincen.gov/boi. The regulations remain in flux, subject to ongoing rulemaking and potential legislative changes.

Limitations of Using Only Sunbiz

If you're building a compliance workflow, sales intelligence product, or risk scoring system on top of the Florida registry alone, here is what you'll run into:

1. Florida is one state. A US business can be registered in Delaware, operate in Florida, and have a parent in California. Florida-only coverage will miss most of the corporate picture.
2. No industry classification. You cannot filter or segment Florida companies by NAICS or SIC without enriching from another source.
3. No financials. Size, revenue, and solvency signals are not in the registry.
4. Thin ownership data. Officers and managers are listed, but there is no beneficial ownership chain.
5. Feed gaps. Annual reports and address changes do not always flow through the daily feeds.
6. Large file sizes. The quarterly corporate file exceeds 1 GB and uses fixed-width ASCII formatting. Standard spreadsheet tools will fail on it.

Florida Secretary of State Contact Information

If you need help with the Florida business search or have questions about filings, contact the Division of Corporations directly.

Florida Business Search FAQs

These frequently asked questions cover the most common topics about searching for businesses in Florida. Find answers about annual reports, fees, API access, bulk data, and status types.