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How to get a list of new LLCs for free

Florida, New York and Colorado publish every new business filing as open data. Here is exactly where, what each file contains, and the work you will have to do to turn it into a usable list.

Florida: the Sunbiz daily files

The Division of Corporations publishes one fixed-width text file per business day with the new corporations, LLCs and partnerships entered into its records that day, usually about a week after their filing date. They are on an SFTP server, sftp.floridados.gov; the public username and password are printed on the daily data page. New filings are in doc/cor/, named yyyymmddc.txt.

Each record is exactly 1,440 characters with no delimiters. The layout gives the offsets: name, filing type, principal and mailing addresses, filing date, FEIN, registered agent and up to six officers. There is no county field, so map the ZIP code yourself. Two traps: many filings leave the principal state blank, and officer names are split into fixed last/first/middle slots.

Our guess at the work: an afternoon to write a parser, then a daily job to download and diff the files.

New York: data.ny.gov

The Department of State posts a rolling 30 days of every filing on data.ny.gov as dataset k4vb-judh, queryable through the Socrata API. Most rows are not new businesses: biennial statements, publications and amendments outnumber formations. Keep ARTICLES OF ORGANIZATION, CERTIFICATE OF INCORPORATION and APPLICATION OF AUTHORITY. The county is the county of principal office, and the only address is where the state forwards legal papers, which is often a registered agent in Albany.

Colorado: data.colorado.gov

The Secretary of State publishes the whole entity register, updated daily, as 4ykn-tg5h. Filter on entityformdate. Addresses and the registered agent are included; the county is not. Colorado appends "Dissolved" and a date to the names of companies that closed, which you will want to strip.

What the free files do not do

• Tell you which addresses belong to registered agents or virtual offices. Over the last 52 weeks 13% of filings across the three states used one, and in some counties most of them did.
• Put the county on Florida and Colorado records.
• Arrive in your inbox, filtered to your counties, every Monday.

That is what our lists add. Try two weeks free, or keep the links above and build it yourself.