Nevada tells you who runs a company every single year — every manager, every director, every principal officer, with an address — and never tells you who owns it. That split is the whole character of the Nevada register, and it is why a record can be current, complete and still say nothing about the person you are actually trying to check.
There is also a reason to read this guide this week rather than next. On Monday 14 September 2026 the Nevada Secretary of State switches off SilverFlume, the portal every existing Nevada guide links to, and replaces it with ORION. This guide covers how the search works, what the record contains and omits, the 2026 fees, the bulk data products, and what the switch changes for anyone consuming Nevada data at scale.
- 456,381 active registered businesses at 31 July 2026, up 2.2% on a year earlier; 89,000 formations and $226.7 million in fees in fiscal 2026.
- Search is free, no account, five keys: business name, entity number, NV Business ID, officer name, registered agent name.
- Management is public. LLCs file every manager or managing member; corporations file every director plus president, secretary and treasurer. All with addresses, every year.
- Ownership is not. Non-managing LLC members, shareholders and beneficial owners are never filed. A series of an LLC is created without any filing at all.
- Two fees keep an entity alive: the annual list ($150 for an LLC; $150 to $11,125 for a corporation, by authorised stock) and the State Business License ($200; $500 for corporations). Due on the last day of the anniversary month.
- Default is instant; revocation takes about 13 months. $75 and $100 penalties, $300 reinstatement, and after five years revoked the charter is gone for good.
- Bulk data is cheap. A full Corporations database dump is $125; unlimited reports are $500 a month. Data only, no images.
- SilverFlume closes 14 September 2026. ORION Phase 2 replaces it. Bookmarked search URLs may stop working.
The Nevada register in numbers
Nevada is one of the few states whose registrar publishes a monthly count. Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar reports formations, renewals and the number of active registered businesses in a press release most months, along with fee revenue — $226.7 million for the fiscal year to 30 June 2026, up 3.8%, on 89,000 new formations.
How many businesses are registered, how many are active, and the trend
The office publishes one headline number: active registered businesses. It was 456,381 at 31 July 2026, against 446,429 a year earlier — up 9,952, or 2.2%. Earlier in the year the gap was wider: 454,064 in March 2026 against 440,008 in March 2025 (+3.2%), and 457,081 in February 2026 against 442,808 in February 2025 (+3.2%). Across fiscal 2026 the office recorded 89,000 new formations and $226.7 million in fee revenue, 3.8% more than the year before. The direction is up; the pace has slowed into the summer.
The office does not publish a count of everything on file. The register also holds every revoked, dissolved, merged, cancelled and withdrawn entity, and all of them remain searchable; the $125 bulk dump returns the whole file with a status on each row, which is the only way to size the inactive population. In practice the active figure is the one to quote, with two caveats below.
| Month | Active registered businesses | Same month, prior year | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| February 2026 | 457,081 | 442,808 | +14,273 (+3.2%) |
| March 2026 | 454,064 | 440,008 | +14,056 (+3.2%) |
| July 2026 | 456,381 | 446,429 | +9,952 (+2.2%) |
Three things to keep in mind when using these figures.
- The count includes licence-only businesses. “Active registered businesses” covers Title 7 entities — corporations, LLCs, LPs, LLPs, LLLPs and business trusts — and non-Title 7 sole proprietors and general partnerships that hold a State Business License. In June 2026, 5,657 of 7,222 formations were Title 7 entities; 1,565 were licence-only.
- It moves both ways. The stock rose to 457,081 in February 2026, fell to 451,927 by June and recovered to 456,381 in July. Formations add to it; defaults and revocations take from it. A falling count is not a formation slowdown.
- September 2025 is an artefact. The August 2025 ransomware attack on the State of Nevada took down card payment processing for the business licensing systems over Labor Day weekend. The office reported lower September filings as a result, contacted around 2,500 entities that may have been unable to renew, extended deadlines and refunded automated late fees. Any Default status or revenue dip dated September 2025 needs that context before it is read as a signal about the company.
The office also publishes its ambition openly: in May 2026 the Secretary said that taking five percent of Delaware’s market would be worth roughly $100 million a year to the state. Nevada is competing for the entities that would otherwise be in Delaware — which is exactly the population where the ownership gap described below matters most.
Which industries carry the Nevada economy
The register cannot answer this. Nevada files no financials, no revenue and no industry code for the entities it registers, so profitability by sector has to come from elsewhere. The best public measure is the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s value added by industry — output, not profit, but the closest thing to a sector ranking that exists at state level.
| Industry | Real value added, 2025 | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Real estate, rental and leasing | $32.3 billion | Largest contributor to state GDP. |
| Arts, entertainment, recreation, accommodation and food services | $31.3 billion | The casino and hospitality economy. |
| Professional and business services | $27.7 billion | Includes the registered-agent and corporate-services industry the register itself supports. |
| Information | Fastest growing | 2025 output roughly 2.5 times its 2015 level. |
Figures are BEA real GDP by industry in chained 2017 dollars, as compiled by USAFacts from the 2025 state release. Two consequences for anyone reading Nevada entity data. First, a large share of the register is holding structures rather than operating businesses — real estate and asset-holding LLCs, which is also where the ownership gap bites hardest. Second, the state’s own proxy for size is the Commerce Tax, charged on Nevada gross revenue above $4 million at a rate set by NAICS category; it is administered by the Department of Taxation, and neither the return nor the rate category is linked to the Secretary of State record.
SilverFlume becomes ORION on 14 September 2026
The register is maintained by the Commercial Recordings Division of the Nevada Secretary of State. For years the public face of it has been SilverFlume, and that is the name most people search for — it draws more monthly searches than any Nevada registry phrase. It is now being retired.
The Secretary of State launched Project ORION in 2023 to replace a portal it described as broken, with too many technical issues and long hold times. Phase 1 went live in December 2025 with a new Uniform Commercial Code module. Phase 2 — business licensing, marks and notary services, and with them the formation and annual list workflow — goes live at 5 a.m. PDT on Monday 14 September 2026. SilverFlume closed to the public at 5 p.m. on 9 September and is decommissioned at the moment ORION opens.
The office has said three useful things about the change. Existing SilverFlume usernames and passwords work in ORION. Historical data is migrated. And during the first week, 14 to 20 September, only 24-hour expedite requests are supported; the 1-, 2- and 4-hour options resume on 21 September.
What this means if you consume Nevada data programmatically
The published ORION feature list includes bulk filing imports and 26 filing types that can be completed via API in XML or JSON. That is a filing API for registered agents and high-volume filers, not a public data-retrieval API. The office has also said links to new forms, timelines and API specifications will be posted on nvsos.gov, and that UCC bulk data already moved to ORION in December 2025. Whether the corporations bulk service and the public search URLs change with Phase 2 had not been published when this guide was written. Anything that hard-codes an esos.nv.gov or nvsilverflume.gov address should be treated as at risk from 14 September.
How to search the Nevada business register
The Business Entity Search is free and needs no account. Corporations, limited-liability companies, limited partnerships, limited-liability partnerships, business trusts and their foreign equivalents all appear, and so do trademarks, trade names, service marks, reserved names and State Business Licences — which means a sole proprietor who holds a licence shows up too, something most state searches do not offer.
Five search keys are available:
- Business name, with four match modes: starts with, contains, exact match, all words.
- Entity number — the Commercial Recordings file number for a specific registration.
- NV Business ID — the statewide identifier beginning
NV, issued to every business including licence-only sole proprietors and general partnerships. - Officer name — first, middle or last name, or an organisation acting as officer.
- Registered agent name.
Results show the entity name, status, filing date, entity type, NV Business ID and entity number. Opening a record adds the registered agent (name, status and address), the filed officers or managers with title, address and status, and three buttons: Filing History, Name History and Mergers/Conversions.
The two keys that do the real work
Officer name and registered agent name are reverse lookups. Because Nevada files every manager and director every year, an officer search returns a person’s whole Nevada footprint — far more than the same search returns in Delaware, which files no officers at all. A registered agent search shows every entity a single agent serves, which is how you find the address that fronts forty unrelated companies.
Names are not disambiguated. Two identical names may be one person or two. Corroborate with addresses and formation dates before drawing a conclusion.
A search is not a name check
The Secretary of State says it plainly: name availability cannot be guaranteed until a filing is approved. The statutory test under NRS 86.171 is whether a name is distinguishable on the records from every entity and reserved name on file, and words such as bank, trust, engineer, architect and accountant need approval from the relevant regulator first. A name reservation is $25 and holds for 90 days.
What the Nevada record contains
| Field | Available | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Entity name, type, status | Free | Status is Active, Default, Revoked or a terminal status such as dissolved or cancelled. |
| NV Business ID and entity number | Free | Two identifiers: the statewide ID and the file number. |
| Formation or registration date | Free | Sets the anniversary month for every future filing. |
| Registered agent | Free | Name, status, Nevada street address. Commercial and non-commercial agents are flagged. |
| Managers or managing members (LLC) | Free | All of them, with a residence or business address. Refiled every year. |
| Directors and officers (corporation) | Free | Every director, plus president, secretary and treasurer or equivalents. Refiled every year. |
| SEC Central Index Key | Free | Publicly traded corporations must file it on the annual list; the office publishes it. |
| Filing history | Free | Every document filed, with dates. Copies are ordered from the office. |
| Name history, mergers and conversions | Free | Prior names with dates; predecessor and successor entities. |
| Certified copies and certificates | Paid | $2 per page, $30 per certification, $50 for a certificate of good standing. |
| Members who do not manage, shareholders | Never filed | Kept by the company under NRS 86.241. Not a public record. |
| Financial statements, revenue, employees | Never filed | Nevada collects no financial data at registration or renewal. |
Two things about the officer data are worth knowing before you rely on it. First, it is self-declared on a list signed under penalty of perjury; NRS 86.263 and NRS 78.150 make it an offence to name a manager or officer with the fraudulent intent of concealing who really exercises that authority, but the office does not verify the names it files. Second, it is refreshed on the anniversary cycle, so a record in good standing is at most about a year old — and a record in Default may be considerably older than it looks.
Out-of-state companies appear too. A foreign corporation qualifying under NRS Chapter 80 or a foreign LLC registering under NRS 86.544 files the same initial and annual lists, pays the same $150 list fee and holds the same licence, and its record shows the home jurisdiction alongside a Nevada entity type prefixed “Foreign”. Every entity, domestic or foreign, must keep a registered agent with a Nevada street address (NRS 86.231); commercial registered agents are registered under NRS Chapter 77 and flagged as such on the record, which is the fastest way to tell a law firm address from a principal’s home.
Who runs it is public. Who owns it is not.
Nevada’s reputation for privacy is half right, and the half that is right matters for compliance teams.
The annual list statute is specific. A limited-liability company files the names and titles of all of its managers or, if it has none, all of its managing members, with an address for each. A corporation files all of its directors and its principal officers. Nevada is therefore considerably more transparent about management than Delaware, whose Division of Corporations collects no officer or director names at all, and it publishes the whole list rather than the three principal officers Georgia collects.
Ownership is a different matter. A member who does not manage the company is never named on any Nevada filing. The list of members is a company record kept at the principal office or with a custodian of records, and under NRS 86.246 the Secretary of State can only require it to be produced, within three business days, at the request of a law enforcement agency in a criminal investigation. For a manager-managed LLC the public record can be complete and accurate and still tell you nothing about the owner.
Series LLCs never reach the register
Under NRS 86.296 an LLC whose articles authorise it may create a series of members by adopting an operating agreement for that series — with no filing at the Secretary of State. A series can sue, contract and hold property in its own name, and its debts are enforceable only against its own assets if records are kept separately. If your counterparty is a series, the Nevada record shows the parent LLC and nothing else. The only public signal is a statement in the parent’s articles that it is authorised to have series.
One more optional label worth reading when you see it: a restricted limited-liability company under NRS 86.1252 elects, in its articles, to bar distributions to members for ten years after formation. It is an estate-planning device more than a trading structure, and its presence on a counterparty record is usually a sign the entity holds assets rather than runs a business.
There is no state beneficial ownership register, and Nevada has not enacted a disclosure requirement of the kind New York introduced for LLCs. Federal reporting under the Corporate Transparency Act stopped for domestic companies when FinCEN’s interim final rule of 26 March 2025 exempted them. The upshot is that Nevada ownership, like ownership in every other US state, is reconstructed from other sources or not at all — our guide to which countries publish UBO data sets out where the US sits internationally.
The anniversary clock: from due date to revocation
Unlike Georgia, where every entity renews in the same window, Nevada runs one clock per entity. The annual list and the State Business License renewal are due on the last day of the month in which the anniversary of formation falls — or, if the entity has selected one, an alternative due date the Secretary of State allows under NRS 86.263. The list must be accompanied by a declaration that the company has complied with the licensing chapter, and it can be filed up to 90 days early; anything earlier is treated as an amended list for the previous year.
- Default. The day after the deadline, the entity is in default. A $75 penalty is added to the list fee (NRS 86.272 for LLCs, NRS 78.170 for corporations) and a $100 penalty to the business licence. Good standing is lost immediately, and with it the ability to obtain a certificate of good standing.
- Revocation. On the first day of the first anniversary of the month following the month in which the filing was required, the charter is revoked and the right to transact business forfeited. In practice that is about 13 months after the due date. The company’s assets are then held in trust by its managers or directors.
- Reinstatement. Available on filing the missing lists, paying every year’s fee and penalty, and paying a $300 reinstatement fee. It relates back to the date of forfeiture, so the gap disappears from the legal record — but not from the filing history.
- Permanent revocation. A charter revoked for five consecutive years cannot be reinstated (NRS 86.276). Its name is released for anyone to use.
- The clean exit. An entity whose charter has already been revoked can file for dissolution without paying the accumulated fees and penalties (NRS 86.4895). A record that goes from Revoked straight to Dissolved is often exactly that: an owner closing the file rather than reviving it.
How to read a Default flag
Default is real and it is common. Because every entity is on its own cycle, at any moment a meaningful share of the register is a few weeks past a deadline, and the office’s own monthly releases show renewals running at four to five times the rate of formations — 28,000 to 40,000 a month. Treat Default as a prompt to check the filing history for the missing list, not as evidence the company has stopped trading. Treat Revoked as the serious signal.
Nevada Secretary of State fees, 2026
Fees below are taken from the Nevada Revised Statutes and the Secretary of State’s published schedules. Nevada charges no franchise tax and no income tax; the two recurring charges that keep an entity alive are the annual list and the State Business License.
| Item | LLC | Profit corporation | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Articles of organization / incorporation | $75 | From $75 | Corporation fee rises with authorised stock (NRS 78.760). |
| Initial list | $150 | $150 to $11,125 | Filed with the articles. Corporation fee tiered by authorised stock. |
| State Business License | $200 a year | $500 a year | Renews with the annual list. Nonprofits and corporations sole exempt. |
| Annual list | $150 a year | $150 to $11,125 | Nonprofit corporations: $25. Due the last day of the anniversary month. |
| First-year total | $425 | From $725 | Articles + initial list + licence. |
| Recurring annual total | $350 | From $650 | List + licence, before any penalty. |
| Late list penalty | $75 | $75 | Nonprofits: $50. |
| Late licence penalty | $100 | $100 | NRS 76.130. |
| Reinstatement | $300 | $300 | Plus every missed year’s fee and penalty. |
| Amend or restate articles | $175 | $175 | |
| Dissolution | $100 | $100 | |
| Name reservation | $25 | $25 | 90 days. |
| Manager or officer resignation | $75 | $75 | Free if filed within 60 days of the initial list. |
| Certificate of good standing | $50 | $50 | |
| Certified copy | $30 + $2/page | $30 + $2/page | Plain copies $2 per page. |
| Expedite | From $125 | From $125 | 24-hour tier; faster tiers cost more. Only 24-hour available 14–20 Sep 2026. |
Two things trip people up. A single-member LLC must still file the list and hold a licence — the office’s FAQ is explicit that a single-member LLC is an entity separate from its owner. And the corporation list fee is calculated on authorised, not issued, stock: $150 for up to $75,000 of authorised capital, rising through fixed bands to a ceiling of $11,125, which is why Nevada corporations are drafted with small authorised share counts.
Online filings are processed the same day at no extra charge; the office publishes a processing-dates page for paper filings, which typically run a few days behind. Certificates of good standing and certified copies are issued electronically and carry a verification code that can be checked on the state portal, so a PDF certificate from a counterparty can be confirmed without ordering a fresh one.
Officers, status and identifiers sourced first-party from the Secretary of State, linked to parents and subsidiaries wherever they are registered. What Nevada never files, we never invent.
Bulk data and API access
Nevada sells its register data, and the price is low by state standards. The Secretary of State’s Bulk Data Download service, reached through an online services account, generates customised reports containing the public data recorded from filings — not document images — and offers full database dumps. The office describes the reports as raw data from its databases, and is explicit that the tool returns no actual documents.
| Product | Price | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Full, unabridged Corporations database dump | $125 | The whole entity register, data only. |
| Customised Corporations data report | $25 + $0.0005 per record | Capped at $125 in total. |
| Full NT7 database dump | $80 | Licence-only sole proprietors and general partnerships. |
| Marks database dump | $65 | Trademarks, trade names and service marks, split out of the corporations file since 2019. |
| Monthly subscription, unlimited reports | $500 a month | All data types. Started by phone with customer service. |
| UCC data and images | See ORION | UCC bulk data moved to ORION in December 2025; the legacy service holds UCC data only to 8 December 2025. |
For comparison, Texas charges $1,350 to $1,750 for a single Master Unload snapshot, Pennsylvania sells filtered lists at $0.25 a name, and Illinois prohibits bulk extraction of its search portal outright. Nevada is closer to the open end of the spectrum with Ohio and Florida, which publish free files, though it charges for the privilege.
There is no public data API
The ORION filing API — 26 filing types in XML or JSON — is for submitting documents, not retrieving records. As of this guide there is no published endpoint for querying Nevada entities programmatically, and the SilverFlume search was a web interface only. Teams that need Nevada in an API today either poll the bulk products on a schedule or use a provider that has already done so; our buyer’s guide to company data APIs covers the options, and our California guide describes the one large state that does run an official API portal.
What the Nevada register never shows
| Gap | Why | Where it lives instead |
|---|---|---|
| Owners | Only managers, managing members, directors and principal officers are filed. | Company records under NRS 86.241; nowhere public. |
| Series of an LLC | Created by operating agreement, no filing. | Only the parent’s articles note that series are authorised. |
| Financials | Nevada collects none. | SEC filings for the small number of listed entities; nothing for private companies. |
| Tax standing | Commerce Tax (gross revenue above $4 million) and Modified Business Tax sit with the Department of Taxation. | My Nevada Tax. Not linked to the Secretary of State record. |
| Trading names | Fictitious firm names are filed with the county clerk under NRS Chapter 602. | Clark County, Washoe County and the other 15 county clerks. |
| Local licences | The State Business License is not a city or county licence. | Municipal and county licensing portals. |
| Liens and secured debt | UCC financing statements are a separate register. | ORION UCC module since December 2025: a UCC-11 information request is $30 online, copies $2 per page. |
| Ownership above Nevada | A foreign parent appears, if at all, only as a manager or officer name. | The parent’s home registry, state or country. |
Nevada against four other state registers
| Feature | Nevada | Delaware | California | Texas | Florida |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Officers or managers shown free | All, every year, with addresses | None collected | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Owners or members filed | No | No | No | No | No |
| Recurring filing | Annual list, anniversary month | Annual report, corporations only | Statement of Information, 12 or 24 months | Annual, via Comptroller | Annual report by 1 May |
| Certificate of good standing | $50 | $50 short form | $5 | $15 | $8.75 |
| Bulk data | $125 full dump; $500/month unlimited | Paid subscription | Paid, via bizfile order | Paid, $1,350–$1,750 per snapshot | Free download |
| Official data API | No (filing API only) | No | Yes, gated portal | No | No |
Nevada column verified against Secretary of State sources and the Nevada Revised Statutes on 13 September 2026; other columns from our guides to Delaware, California, Texas and Florida. The full picture across all 50 states and DC is in the Secretary of State business search guide.
Commercial Recordings Division contact
For filings, copies, certificates and the bulk data subscription, the Commercial Recordings Division is reached at the Secretary of State’s Carson City office: Nevada State Capitol Building, 101 North Carson Street, Suite 3, Carson City, NV 89701. Customer service runs Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pacific, on 775-684-5708; general enquiries go to sosmail@sos.nv.gov and the fax line is 775-684-5725. The Las Vegas office, on 702-486-2880, takes visitors by appointment. Public records requests are handled through sosrecords@sos.nv.gov. Portal support, which moves to ORION with the cut-over, has been reached at support@nvsilverflume.gov.
Working with Nevada data at scale
For a single company, use the state search. It is free, it is authoritative, and no provider improves on it for one lookup. If you need a certificate of good standing you must buy it from the state; nobody else can issue one.
The state search stops being the right tool at three points:
- Volume. Screening a vendor file, a merchant portfolio or a CRM against Nevada status means either buying the $125 dump on a schedule and diffing it yourself, or subscribing to a normalised feed that has already done that across every state.
- Linkage. Nevada sees Nevada. The Delaware parent, the California subsidiary and the Wyoming sibling that share a registered agent are four searches on four portals with no common identifier. The officer names Nevada files so generously are the join key — but only if you hold the other three registers in the same shape.
- Change. The register moves every day and the portal itself changes on 14 September. Monitoring Default, Revoked and officer changes across a book of Nevada counterparties is a data pipeline, not a bookmark.
Use the Nevada strengths for what they are. The annual officer refresh makes Nevada one of the better states for management-level screening and for reverse lookups. The ownership silence means every Nevada KYB check on a manager-managed LLC needs a second source, and no amount of registry data will change that.
Every US state register and 400+ official registries worldwide, refreshed as they change, with the registry source on every field.
Frequently asked questions
How do I search for a business entity in Nevada?
Is the Nevada business entity search free?
What is the difference between an NV Business ID and an entity number?
What does a Nevada status of Default mean?
When is the Nevada annual list due and how much does it cost?
Does the Nevada business search show who owns a company?
Does the Nevada record show directors and officers?
What is SilverFlume, and what is ORION?
Can I download Nevada business entity data in bulk?
Is the Nevada business search a name availability check?
Fees, deadlines and statutory references verified against the Nevada Revised Statutes (chapters 76, 78 and 86, current through the 2025 session) and Nevada Secretary of State publications on 13 September 2026, the day before the ORION cut-over. Registry counts are from the Secretary of State’s monthly press releases. Re-verify portal URLs and bulk data arrangements after 14 September 2026.