Utah Business Entity Search: 839,455 Active Companies

Search Google for a Utah Secretary of State business search and you will not find one. Utah is one of the few states that keeps its company register outside the Secretary of State's office: every LLC, corporation, nonprofit, partnership and assumed business name is filed with the Division of Corporations and Commercial Code at the Utah Department of Commerce. This guide covers how that register works, how to search it, what each record shows, and what the data says about Utah's business population, using both the state's own published figures and Global Database's registry-sourced Utah dataset.

Who keeps Utah's business register?

Utah moved company filings out of the Secretary of State's office in 1984, when the Division of Corporations and Commercial Code was created to take over corporate and commercial code duties that the Secretary of State had handled until then. The Division now sits inside the Department of Commerce. Utah has no Secretary of State at all: the Lieutenant Governor carries out that role, and that office handles elections and state records rather than business filings.

The Division is the filing office for:

• For-profit and nonprofit corporations, including benefit corporations
• Limited liability companies, domestic and foreign
• Limited partnerships, limited liability partnerships and general partnerships
• Business trusts and real estate investment trusts
• Sole proprietors and other businesses using an assumed business name (DBA)
• State trademarks, UCC Article 9 financing statements and agricultural liens

Only corporations and LLCs are created by filing with the Division. Partnerships, trusts and DBAs are notice filings: the business can exist without them, but the filing puts it on the public record. That distinction matters when you read the data, because a missing partnership filing does not prove a partnership does not exist.

Key dates in the Utah register

How many companies are registered in Utah?

There are two useful ways to count Utah companies, and they answer different questions.

The state's own count. The Department of Commerce's FY2025 annual report, covering 1 July 2024 to 30 June 2025, gives 637,063 total active business registrations. In the same year the Division processed 97,090 new business registrations and 340,233 renewals. The Department's review of calendar 2025 reported 644,282 business and other registrations at the Division and noted a year-end rush of 46,712 filings in November and more than 54,000 in December. By then, 97% of filings were made online.

Global Database's count. Global Database holds 2,382,239 Utah company records, sourced from the Utah Division of Corporations and Commercial Code and enriched from other sources. Of those, 839,455 are active and 1,539,503 are inactive, meaning they have been dissolved, expired, withdrawn or otherwise closed. The remaining few thousand carry an intermediate or unconfirmed status.

Why is the active figure higher than the state's 637,063? Scope. The state's figure counts registrations held by the Division at one point in time. Global Database counts every company record it holds with a Utah location, which includes Utah-based businesses formed in other states such as Delaware, Nevada or Wyoming, as well as records added from sources beyond the Utah register. Both figures are correct for what they measure: use the state's number for "how many registrations does Utah hold", and Global Database's for "how many active companies operate in Utah".

The inactive count is just as important. Nearly two in three Utah records belong to companies that are no longer active. The Division does not publish an inactive total, so if your work involves checking historical counterparties, matching old invoices or investigating dissolved entities, you need a dataset that keeps closed companies rather than a list of current ones.

Utah registration trends, 2020–2026

Every measure points the same way: Utah is forming companies faster than it was at the start of the decade, and 2026 is on course to beat every previous year.

New Utah companies by incorporation year

Global Database's Utah records show 85,282 companies incorporated in 2020, rising to 115,971 in 2025, an increase of 36% in five years. The path was not smooth. Formations jumped 17.2% in 2021 as pandemic-era start-ups arrived, flattened in 2022, grew 4.1% in 2023, dipped 2.5% in 2024 and then surged 14.2% in 2025 to the highest annual total in the dataset.

New registrations reported by the Division

The Division's own annual reports show the same climb on a fiscal-year basis (July to June). New filings rose from 73,946 in FY2020 to 90,705 in FY2021 and 93,151 in FY2022, then held at roughly 97,000 a year: 97,221 in FY2024 and 97,090 in FY2025. The Department did not publish a comparable figure for FY2023. The FY2025 figure also absorbed the switch to the new registration system in September 2024, which the Department says caused a temporary backlog that was later cleared.

Business applications: 2026 is running far ahead

A third, independent measure comes from the U.S. Census Bureau, which counts applications for an Employer Identification Number (EIN) made for a business purpose. EIN applications are not the same as state registrations, but they track the appetite for starting businesses. Utah recorded 51,285 applications in 2020, 63,272 in 2021, 65,304 in 2022, 71,450 in 2023, 68,471 in 2024 and 72,787 in 2025.

2026 is moving much faster. From January to September 2026 Utah logged 69,052 applications, against 53,312 in the same months of 2025, a rise of 29.5%. Every single month of 2026 so far has beaten the same month of 2025, and September 2026's 9,731 applications is the highest monthly figure in the series, which goes back to 2004.

How many new Utah companies are still active?

Formation numbers only tell half the story. Global Database's records show how many companies from each year's cohort are still active today, and the drop-off is steep. Of the 115,971 Utah companies incorporated in 2025, 92.7% are still active. For the 2023 cohort the figure is 66.9%. For companies formed in 2020, only 40.8% remain active.

In other words, more than half of the Utah companies formed in 2020 or 2021 have already closed, lapsed or been dissolved. Many never traded at all: Utah's annual renewal cycle means a company that stops filing drops out of active status within a year or two. For anyone onboarding a Utah customer or supplier, a formation date alone says little; the current status, and how recently it changed, is what matters.

What kinds of entities are Utah businesses?

Utah is LLC country. In FY2022, the last year the Department broke new filings down by type, LLCs accounted for 65,497 of 93,151 new filings, about 70%. Assumed business names (DBAs) made up roughly one in five, corporations under 10%, and limited partnerships just a few hundred.

LLC filings also grew fastest: up 26% in FY2021 and a further 8% in FY2022, while DBA and corporation filings fell back in FY2022.

How big are Utah companies?

Global Database holds an employee count for 376,773 active Utah companies. Almost nine in ten (88.7%) have fewer than 10 employees. About 42,500 employ 10 or more people, 6,976 employ 50 or more, 1,675 employ 250 or more, and 559 employ more than 1,000.

That shape is typical of an LLC-heavy register: a long tail of single-owner and micro businesses, and a few thousand employers that account for most of the state's corporate activity. For sales teams, the 6,976 Utah companies with 50+ staff are a far more precise target list than the full register.

How to use the Utah business entity search

The Division's public entity search runs on the business registration system launched on 16 September 2024. Searching is free. Filing requires a UtahID, and owners can lock their filings and control which users may change them, a useful safeguard against fraudulent amendments.

1. Go to the Division's site at commerce.utah.gov/corporations and open the business search.
2. Search by business name or entity number. Name searches return a list of matches; the entity number is the most reliable way to find one specific record.
3. Filter by status if you only want active entities.
4. Open the record to see the entity's details, principals and filing history.
5. Order a certificate of existence if you need official proof of standing ($12 short form, $20 long form).

What a Utah business record contains

The public record is strong on identity and standing, and says nothing about ownership or size.

Example: a Utah record in Global Database

Here is how one well-known Utah company, the regional airline group SkyWest, appears in Global Database. Each field carries its source, so you can tell what came from the Utah register and what was added through enrichment.

The registry fields (status, incorporation date, address and officers) come straight from Utah's register. The rest (contact details, employee count, listing, industry) is what turns a registry entry into a usable company profile for sales, risk or data teams.

Utah statuses, annual renewals, fees and reinstatement

Utah calls its annual report a renewal. It is due every year by the end of the month in which the entity was first registered, and missing it is the most common reason a Utah company drops out of active status.

Fees under the schedule in force since 1 July 2025:

For LLCs, the rules that applied until the 2026 recodification let the Division start administrative dissolution once a renewal was 60 days overdue, give the company 60 days' notice to fix it, and then dissolve it. A dissolved LLC could apply for reinstatement within two years, paying everything that fell due in the meantime. The recodification reorganised these statutes into Title 16, so check the current code before relying on a specific section number.

Utah company data: state portal vs Global Database

The Division's search is the right tool for looking up a single business. It is not built for lists, change tracking or cross-state work.

Data completeness for active Utah companies

Because Utah's register is identity-focused, enrichment is uneven. Global Database has a registration number for 99.3% of active Utah companies and a geocoded address for 93.1%. Employee counts cover 44.9%. Contact data is thinner, as it is for small LLCs in every state: phone numbers for 11.6%, websites for 5.7% and email addresses for 0.5%.

That is the honest picture: the registry fields are close to complete, and contact fields are concentrated among larger, established businesses. If you are building a Utah prospect list, filter to companies with a website or phone, or to companies with 10+ employees, and you get a much smaller but far more usable list.

Who uses Utah company data?

Utah combines one of the fastest-growing small-business populations in the country with a strong base of technology, financial services and direct-selling companies. That makes its register useful well beyond the state.

• KYB and onboarding. Confirm that a Utah business exists, is active, and is run by the people who say they run it. Cross-check the registered address and officers against what the applicant submitted.
• Supplier and procurement risk. Check standing before paying invoices, and get alerted when a supplier turns delinquent or changes its principals or address.
• Lending and payments. Use formation date, status history and cohort survival as early risk signals for thin-file small businesses: as the data above shows, most Utah companies formed five years ago are no longer active.
• Sales and marketing. Target newly incorporated Utah companies each month, or narrow the register to the few thousand employers with 50+ staff.
• Data, AI and MDM teams. Use a sourced, standardised register as the reference layer for entity resolution across CRM, ERP and third-party data, and as clean training and grounding data for AI agents.
• Investigations and due diligence. Trace officers across Utah and other states, and map Utah-registered foreign entities back to their home-state records.

For a one-off check, the Division's free search is enough. For lists, monitoring or anything cross-state, the Global Database API, continuous monitoring and MCP integration save the manual work. Other states are covered in our state-by-state registry guide.

More US state registry guides

Comparing Utah with other states? These guides cover each state's registry, fees, data gaps and bulk access in the same format.

Frequently asked questions