Is there a national database of US business registrations?

No. The United States has no national business registry. Companies are chartered under state law, so each of the 50 states keeps its own, run by its Secretary of State or an equivalent office. Getting one national view means pulling all 50 registries and reconciling their separate formats into a single schema.

Why isn't there one national registry?

Because a company is chartered by a state, not the federal government. When you form an LLC or a corporation, you file with a state office, in most states the Secretary of State, and that office records the entity. There are 50 such offices, one per state, and no federal registry sits above them. The same split is why counting US LLCs means adding up 50 separate registries rather than reading one federal number.

The two federal datasets people reach for are not registries of companies. The IRS issues an Employer Identification Number to anything that applies for one. The Census Bureau's Business Formation Statistics counts those EIN applications. An application is a request, not a filed company, and neither source records a company's legal status, its officers, or its registered agent. Those exist only in the state registry where the entity was formed.

So "look it up nationally" has no official answer. You look up a company in the one state where it is registered, using that state's search tool, that state's identifier, and that state's status labels.

What does the fragmentation actually look like?

Three things differ across all 50 registries: how each one records a company's status, how it labels entity type, and how it numbers entities. None of the three is standardized.

Status is the clearest case. Reduce each registry's wording to a normalized value and you get a short list: active, dissolved, inactive, suspended, and a few more. Read the raw text underneath and there are 799 distinct strings. 129 of them all mean the same thing, that a company is simply active. Eight of those 129, with the number of records carrying each:

A filter for "active companies" that checks status = 'Active' silently drops every company a registry happens to call "Good Standing" or "Exists." Dissolved is worse: 261 raw strings collapse to that one value.

Entity type has the same problem. There are 1,040 distinct raw type strings across the registries, and 106 of them all mean "limited liability company." One state writes "LLC," another "Limited Liability Company," another "Domestic Limited Liability Company," and Florida writes "Florida Limited Liability Company."

Identifiers are harder still, because states do not even agree on a shape. A registry number is only meaningful inside its own state, and the format changes from state to state:

To pull one company you need to know which state it is in and how that state writes its numbers. To pull every company, you need all 50 conventions at once.

How do you get one view across all 50 states?

There are two honest ways, and both start from the same 50 registries.

The first is to reconcile them yourself. Query or scrape each state's system, then map every state's status strings, type labels, and identifier formats onto one schema, and keep the mappings current as states change their portals. It is the 799-strings-to-one-status problem above, repeated for entity type and identifiers, maintained for 50 moving targets.

The second is to start from a dataset where that work is already done. GovFiles aggregates business-entity records from all 50 state registries into one schema, refreshed monthly, delivered as a REST API and bulk Parquet. Status is normalized to a single field with the registry's exact wording kept alongside it in status_raw, so "Good Standing" and "Exists" both resolve to active while the original text stays available. A company is addressed the way the registries are, by jurisdiction code and registry number:

curl -s 'https://api.govfiles.dev/v2/companies/us_wy/1994-000291097' \
  -H "X-API-Key: $KEY"

The /v2/jurisdictions endpoint lists the 50 registries behind that single schema, which is the national index the states themselves do not publish.

Frequently asked

Is there a national database of US business registrations? No. The United States has no federal business registry. Companies are chartered under state law, so each of the 50 states runs its own registry through its Secretary of State or an equivalent office. A national view requires collecting all 50 and normalizing them into one schema.

How many US business registries are there? Fifty, one per state. Each has its own online search, its own entity-number format, and its own vocabulary for recording status. Across the 50 registries, at least 799 distinct raw status strings appear, of which 129 all mean a company is simply active.

Why isn't there one federal US company register? Because incorporation is a matter of state law. A company is chartered by a state, not the federal government, so no single federal office records every US business entity. The IRS issues EINs and the Census Bureau counts business applications, but neither is a registry of formed companies.

How do I search business entities across all 50 states at once? There is no official all-states search. You either query each state's registry separately and reconcile the results, or use a dataset that has already normalized the 50 registries into one schema with consistent status, entity-type, and identifier fields.