Every corporation, limited liability company and limited partnership formed in Florida, or registered to do business there, files with the Division of Corporations of the Florida Department of State. The division's website is known as Sunbiz, and its records are open to anyone. This guide explains what a record contains, how to read it and what it cannot tell you.

Why the records are public

Florida law makes government records open by default: “It is the policy of this state that all state, county, and municipal records are open for personal inspection and copying by any person” (Fla. Stat. § 119.01(1)). Filings delivered to the Department of State are such records. You need neither an account nor a reason to look up a business at search.sunbiz.org.

What a record contains

The content of a record follows from what the law requires a business to file. Two filings matter most.

The formation document. Articles of incorporation must set forth the corporate name, the street address of the initial principal office and, if different, the mailing address, the number of authorized shares, the street address of the registered office with the name of the registered agent, and the name and address of each incorporator (Fla. Stat. § 607.0202). Articles of organization of an LLC must state the name, the street and mailing addresses of the principal office, and the name and Florida street address of the registered agent (Fla. Stat. § 605.0201).

The annual report. Each year a corporation reports its name, its date of incorporation, the street address of its principal office and its mailing address, its federal employer identification number, and the names and business street addresses of its directors and principal officers (Fla. Stat. § 607.1622). An LLC reports, among other things, the name, title or capacity, and address of at least one person who has the authority to manage the company (Fla. Stat. § 605.0212).

Taken together, a record tells you:

  • the exact legal name and the type of entity,
  • the document number assigned by the division, which is the key to store when you work with the data,
  • the date of filing and the current status,
  • the principal address and the mailing address,
  • the registered agent and the registered office,
  • the officers, directors or managers named in the latest report,
  • the history of filed documents and annual reports.

The registered agent's address is not the principal address

Every corporation must “designate and continuously maintain” a registered office and a registered agent in Florida (Fla. Stat. § 607.0501). The agent receives legal papers on behalf of the business. Many businesses appoint a commercial registered agent or a law firm, so many unrelated companies can share one registered office address. If you want to know where a business is actually located, look at the principal address, and remember that this, too, may be a home, a mailbox or an accountant's office.

How to read the status

An entity keeps its active status by filing an annual report. The report is due between January 1 and May 1 (§ 607.1622(4)). If the report is filed after May 1, a late charge of $400 is added to the fee (§ 607.193(2)(b)). If the report is still not delivered “by 5 p.m. Eastern Time on the third Friday in September,” the department may dissolve the corporation administratively (Fla. Stat. § 607.1420); the same deadline applies to LLCs (Fla. Stat. § 605.0714).

Two practical consequences:

  • “Inactive” often means “did not file,” not necessarily “out of business.” A dissolved entity can apply for reinstatement, and some businesses keep operating in the meantime.
  • “Active” means “has filed,” not “is operating.” An entity can be active for years without customers, staff or a website.

Because of the September deadline, a list of active entities pulled in August and one pulled in October can differ noticeably. Always note the date on which a list was pulled.

“Doing business as” names: the fictitious name registration

The name on a storefront is often not the name of the legal entity. Florida's Fictitious Name Act defines a fictitious name as “any name under which a person transacts business in this state, other than the person's legal name” and requires it to be registered with the Division of Corporations before business is done under it (Fla. Stat. § 865.09). The registration lists the name, the mailing address of the business and the name and address of each registrant. When a search by the storefront name finds no corporation, the fictitious name records are the next place to look.

Bulk data instead of single lookups

You do not have to look up businesses one at a time. The division states that it “offers free data downloads for informational purposes”: daily files with the filings added that day and quarterly files, generated in January, April, July and October, that “contain all active data at the time the file is generated” (Sunbiz, Data Downloads). The downloads “are offered as is and may be changed, replaced or deleted at any time.” What is free and what is not is covered in Is Sunbiz data free?; the daily files are covered in How to find new business filings in Florida. The file descriptions are quoted as they read on October 11, 2026.

The corporate file definitions describe a fixed-length text file with one 1,440-character record per entity: corporation number, name, status (“A” for active, “I” for inactive), filing type, principal and mailing address, file date, FEI number, the dates of the last three annual reports, the registered agent, and up to six officers. The division adds a caveat worth taking seriously: addresses and listed officers in the file “may not reflect the most current information on sunbiz.org because of the limited space in the file.”

For a sense of scale: the division's own statistics showed 4,129,182 active business entities as of July 8, 2026, 3,004,129 of them limited liability companies (Sunbiz, Yearly Statistics).

What Sunbiz does not tell you

  • No phone number, no website. The statutes cited above do not list them among the required contents of the formation documents or the annual report, and the data file has no such fields.
  • No industry. The filings contain no NAICS code or other industry classification. You cannot ask the registry for “all roofing contractors.”
  • No license. Whether a contractor, broker or clinic holds a professional license is recorded by the licensing agencies, not by the Division of Corporations. See Florida professional license lookups.
  • No size. There are no employee counts and no revenue figures.
  • No sole proprietors as such. The entity filings described above are made by corporations, LLCs and partnerships. A person doing business under their own legal name appears in the division's records only through another filing, such as a fictitious name registration.

Using Sunbiz for prospecting

For checking a single business, Sunbiz is the official source and costs nothing. For building a prospect list, it is the starting point, not the finished product: it gives you identity and address, and you have to add industry and contact details from other sources. How to do that step by step is described in How to build a Florida B2B prospect list by industry and county.

Two cautions before you copy names from the registry into a campaign:

  • Officers and agents are people. A public record is not an invitation to market to the individuals named in it at their home address. If you are subject to privacy laws, as we are under the EU's GDPR, such names are personal data.
  • Public does not mean unrestricted. Email, calls and texts have their own rules, no matter where the contact details came from. See Cold outreach rules in Florida.

This article is for general information and is not legal advice. Statutes are quoted as published on October 10, 2026, and the Division of Corporations pages as they read on October 11, 2026; check the current text before relying on a deadline, a fee or a file description.

Which public sources we plan to use for the Florida Business Database is described under data sources and methodology.