- Coverage
- All fifty states and DC
- Included
- First year with every formation
- Handling
- Same day scan and flag
- Canada
- Registered office address also provided
Registered agent service in every state
A real street address the state and the courts can reach, staffed during business hours, with anything received scanned to you the same day it arrives.
- Failure mode
- A judgment entered without you knowing there was a case
The least interesting service we sell, and the one with the worst failure mode.
A registered agent exists so that the state and the courts have a guaranteed way to reach your company. It sounds like an administrative formality until the day something genuinely important is delivered there. A lawsuit served on an agent who has stopped operating, or on an address you moved away from, is still served. The response clock runs whether or not you know about it.
Default judgments entered because a company never received the complaint are not rare, and reopening one is far more expensive than the agent fee that would have prevented it.
There is also the privacy dimension. In most states, the registered agent address is public. If you run a business from home and act as your own agent, your home address is in a searchable public database attached to your name.
What the appointment requires.
What the appointment actually obliges
- A physical street address in the state of formation. Not a post office box, and not an address in another state.
- Availability during business hours to accept service of process in person.
- Prompt forwarding of anything received, because the clock on a lawsuit starts at service, not at the point you read it.
- The address appears in the public record, which is why using your home is a privacy decision as much as a practical one.
- A current appointment at all times. A lapse can itself put the entity out of good standing.
- Typical year
- A handful of state notices
- The one that matters
- Service of process, flagged same day
- Also arrives
- Official looking solicitations, which we identify as such
What actually arrives at a registered agent.
Less than people imagine, and more consequential than they expect. In a normal year most entities receive a handful of items, and the ratio of noise to signal is the reason a good agent flags rather than forwards.
The routine mail is state correspondence: the annual report reminder, franchise tax notices, and confirmations of filings already made. Alongside that comes a steady stream of solicitations designed to look official, often printed on forms that mimic state letterhead and asking for a fee to file something you either do not need or could file yourself for less. We recognise these and say so rather than passing them on without comment.
The item that matters is service of process. A complaint, a summons, a subpoena, or a notice of levy. These are rare and they start a clock measured in days. Everything about how an agent operates should be designed around the small number of occasions when one of these arrives, which is why we scan and flag the same business day rather than batching post weekly.
- Cost
- A state filing fee plus our handling
- The risk
- A gap between the old and new appointment
Switching agents without leaving a gap.
Changing registered agent is a state filing and it is inexpensive. What matters is the sequencing, because the failure mode is a window in which the old appointment has ended and the new one has not yet been recorded. Anything served during that gap is served on nobody, and it is still served.
We appoint first and resign the old agent after the state has recorded the change, rather than the other way round. If your current agent has already resigned, or has gone out of business, that is more urgent than it sounds and should be dealt with in days rather than weeks, because most states give an entity a limited period to appoint a replacement before it falls out of good standing on that ground alone.
Common questions
If you have a physical address in the state and you are there during business hours, yes. The trade offs are that the address is public, that you must be reachable in person, and that being served a lawsuit in front of a client is an experience people tend to only have once.
We accept it, scan it the same business day, and send it to you with a note about what it appears to be and whether it looks time sensitive. Anything that looks like service of process is flagged immediately rather than batched.
You need one in every state where the entity is registered, which is the state of formation plus every state where you have foreign qualified. If you have employees or premises in three states, that is likely three appointments.
Yes. It is a state filing, usually inexpensive, and we handle it. Doing it properly matters, because a gap between the old appointment ending and the new one starting is exactly the window in which something gets served on nobody.
Need an agent, or need to switch one?
Both are quick. Switching properly matters more than switching cheaply.