How do you find out who owns a business?

To find out who owns a business, start with the state's Secretary of State record, and know its limits. The public filing names a registered agent, and often the officers or managers, not the beneficial owner. For most private US companies the true owner is not in any public database, and that is by design.

What the public record actually shows

A US company is registered with one state, and that state's business filing is the primary public record about it. The filing reliably tells you three things: the entity's legal name, its status, and its registered agent. Depending on the state and the entity type, it may also list the people who run the company. It rarely tells you who owns it.

The one person named on almost every record is the registered agent. Across the 50 state registries, at least 71,561,839 of the 92,347,458 business entities on file name a registered agent, spread across 49 of the 50 registries, as of July 2026. That near-universal coverage is not a coincidence: every state requires a corporation or LLC to keep a registered agent on file as a condition of staying registered. The agent receives lawsuits and state mail on the company's behalf. It is a contact address, not an owner, and it is frequently a commercial registered agent that represents hundreds of thousands of unrelated companies.

Take a real Delaware record. Look up one of Home Depot's Delaware corporations, registry number 3006585, and the entity record lists exactly one party: its registered agent, The Corporation Trust Company. No officer, no director, no owner. Delaware's public record names only the registered agent, for corporations and LLCs alike, which is why the state is a favorite for owners who want privacy.

Why the registered agent is not the owner

A registered agent is the party a business designates to receive service of process and official state correspondence. Naming one is a legal requirement, not a claim of ownership, and the agent has no authority over the company. Owners hire the agent, not the other way around.

This is the single most common mistake in ownership research. The name on the filing is easy to find and looks authoritative, so it gets recorded as the owner. It is usually a law firm, a formation service, or a company like CT Corporation or CSC whose entire business is receiving mail for other people's companies.

Where a state does name the people who run a company

Beyond the agent, what a state publishes about a company's people varies by state and entity type. For a corporation, most states collect officers and directors on the annual report or statement of information. For an LLC, some states publish the managers, some publish the members, and some publish neither.

Even when a state lists managers or members, those are the people who run or hold an interest in the company as filed, which is not always the same as the ultimate beneficial owner. A manager can be an employee. A listed member can be another holding company. The filing shows the layer the state collects, and stops there.

Which states let owners stay off the record

Four states let an LLC form and operate without naming a single owner on the public record. They are the states marketed for "anonymous LLCs."

New Mexico is the strongest of the four because it has no annual report requirement, so a change of members or managers never reaches the public file. In Nevada a service provider can appear as a nominee manager in exchange for a fee, standing in for the real owner on the record.

Most other states require some disclosure. Florida, for example, requires an LLC's managers or members on its public annual report. The point is that ownership visibility is a policy choice each state makes, and in the four states above the choice is to keep it private.

Is there a national database of business owners?

No. There is no national business registry of any kind, and no public registry of owners in particular. The closest thing ever built is the beneficial-ownership registry created by the federal Corporate Transparency Act, and two facts about it matter for anyone trying to look up an owner.

First, it was never public. Access to the beneficial-ownership database is limited by statute to government agencies for law enforcement and to financial institutions running customer checks. An ordinary person or business could never query it.

Second, US companies no longer report to it. In an interim final rule published on March 26, 2025, FinCEN redefined the term "reporting company" to cover only entities formed outside the United States. Every company formed in a US state, and its owners, is now exempt from beneficial-ownership reporting. This is a regulatory change rather than a repeal of the law, and a final rule is still expected, so the requirement could return. As of July 2026 it does not apply to US-formed companies.

A few states have started their own transparency rules, but they follow the same pattern. New York's LLC Transparency Act took effect on January 1, 2026, but after a December 2025 veto it applies only to LLCs formed outside the United States, and the ownership information it collects is kept confidential rather than posted publicly. No state has built an open, searchable registry of who owns its companies.

Where to look when the registry does not have the owner

When the state filing does not name the owner, a few other records sometimes do, each with a clear limit:

• The SEC's EDGAR system lists beneficial owners and insiders, but only for public companies and large stakeholders, a small fraction of all entities.
• County property and UCC records can surface an owner if the company holds real estate or has pledged collateral, tying the entity to a named person.
• Court filings can name owners when the company has been party to a lawsuit.
• A DBA or trade-name filing links a brand to the person or company that filed it, which is a filer, not necessarily the beneficial owner.
• The company's own annual report or statement of information, where the state publishes it, is often the best single source for officers and managers.

None of these is a shortcut to the beneficial owner of a private company that keeps its filings minimal. For those, the honest answer is that the information is not public.

Pulling the people a registry does publish

The people a state does file, the registered agent and any officers or managers, are public record, but they sit in 50 different systems with different formats and different labels. GovFiles normalizes the parties every US registry publishes into one schema, so you can pull them for any entity from a single endpoint instead of searching each state by hand. Each record returns the entity's parties with their roles, verifiable against the docs at docs.govfiles.dev.

# The people on a company's public record, normalized across all 50 states
curl -H "X-API-Key: $KEY" \
  "https://api.govfiles.dev/v2/companies/us_de/3006585"

# ...parties[] returns each person with their role:
# { "name": "THE CORPORATION TRUST COMPANY",
#   "roles": [ { "kind": "registered_agent" } ] }

The role tells you what the state recorded. A registered_agent is an address for legal mail. An officer or manager is someone who runs the company. Neither is a guarantee of ownership, which is the one thing the public record usually does not hold.

Frequently asked

How do you find out who owns a business? Start with the state's Secretary of State business record, which is public and free to search. It names the registered agent, and in many states the officers of a corporation or the managers of an LLC. It usually does not name the beneficial owner. For most private US companies, the true owner is not recorded in any public database.

Is the registered agent the owner of a business? No. A registered agent is the person or company designated to receive legal mail and service of process for a business. Every US corporation and LLC must name one, so a registered agent appears on nearly every registry record, but the role carries no ownership. The agent is often a commercial service that represents thousands of unrelated companies.

Can you look up the owner of an LLC? Sometimes. It depends on the state. Many states publish the LLC's managers or members on the formation document or an annual report. Four states, Delaware, Nevada, New Mexico, and Wyoming, let an LLC form and operate without naming any owner on the public record, so in those states the owner is usually not discoverable from the filing.

Is there a public database of US business owners? No. There is no public national registry of who owns US companies. The federal beneficial-ownership registry created by the Corporate Transparency Act was never open to the public, and since an interim final rule published on March 26, 2025, US-formed companies no longer report to it at all. Ownership of most private US businesses is not on any public record.

Which states allow anonymous LLCs? Delaware, Nevada, New Mexico, and Wyoming. In these states the public formation filing lists the company name and its registered agent but does not require the members or managers to be named. New Mexico is the strongest because it has no annual report, so ownership changes never reach the public file. Nevada lists managers but permits a nominee to stand in.