Last updated: August 1, 2026 · Reviewed by the CorpFacts editorial team
Every state requires a registered LLC or corporation to name a registered agent: a person or company, at a physical street address in that state, designated to receive legal and official documents on the entity’s behalf. It is one of the few fields a formation filing cannot leave blank — and one of the most misread lines in any registry record.
The job: receiving service of process
The role exists so that an entity can always be found. If the business is sued, the lawsuit is delivered — served — on the registered agent, and delivery to the agent counts as delivery to the company. The agent also receives official mail from the state: annual-report reminders, tax notices, compliance demands. That is the whole job. To perform it, the agent must have a street address in the state (a PO box does not satisfy any state) and be available at it during business hours. The address is called the registered office, and both it and the agent’s name are public record — which is why they appear on the entity’s page in a state business registry search.
The agent is not the owner
Because the agent is often the only name a registry shows, it gets read as the proprietor. Usually it is not. Most entities of any size appoint a commercial registered-agent service — a company whose entire business is being the agent for thousands of entities at once — so the same few names repeat across a state’s register endlessly. Our registered-agents section measures exactly this: the largest agents in a state’s file are service companies, and their scale tells you about the agent-services market, not about who owns what. Ownership is simply not what this field records; many states do not put member or shareholder names on the public record at all.
How pronounced that is varies enormously by state, and the register overviews state it per register — how many agents clear the volume bar, what share of the register’s filings the largest few hold, and what kinds of entity they act for: California, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania.
The clearest illustration is Delaware, because it is the one state whose register nobody can publish: where Delaware companies actually operate counts the Delaware-incorporated entities on file in the registers we do hold, and the agents they name in those states — which, for the reason above, is almost never the same firm a reader assumes.
Who can be the agent
Anyone who meets the address-and-availability test: the owner themselves, another individual resident in the state, or a commercial service. Serving as your own agent is legal and free, with two practical costs — your street address goes on the public record, and a process server can appear at it (your home, if that is the address) in front of whoever happens to be there. A service trades a fee for privacy, consistency, and an address in states where you have none — which is also why an entity expanding into a second state, where it must foreign-qualify and name an agent there too, almost always uses one. What that service includes and what drives its cost is a separate question from what the role is, and has its own page.
If the agent lapses
An entity whose agent resigns, moves or cannot be found stops being reachable, and the consequences are mechanical: the state can revoke the entity’s good standing and ultimately dissolve it administratively, and a plaintiff who cannot serve the agent may be allowed to serve the Secretary of State instead — after which a lawsuit the owner never saw can proceed to a default judgment. If you own an entity and are not certain who its agent currently is, look the entity up in your state’s registry and read the line — it is public, and it is the line the courts will use.
You received something from a registered agent
Because the role is to receive and pass on, most mail bearing an agent’s name is a document addressed to a company that appointed that agent — a court filing, a notice from the state, or a reminder that an annual filing is due. The agent is a conduit: it is named by the company, not by whoever wrote the document, and it is normally not a party to whatever the document concerns. Hearing from one is not itself a claim against you.
Two situations get confused. If you own the entity, the agent is doing the job it was appointed for, and what matters is the document it forwarded rather than the agent that forwarded it. If you do not recognize the entity at all, remember that the prominent name on the envelope is usually the agent’s, not the sender’s — the company that appointed it is the party to identify, and that relationship is on the public record.
If it reads as a penalty or a fee demand, verify before paying. Solicitations designed to resemble state or agent correspondence are common, and they trade on the fact that genuine agent mail looks official. What a register actually says about a company — including its agent of record — is public: look the company up in your state’s registry and read the line. You can also check whether a name is a real high-volume firm rather than an invention: our registered-agent index publishes, per state register, how many entities each listed agent is on file for.
This describes what the role is and how to check a record. It is not legal advice about anything you have received: what a particular document requires, and by when, depends on the state and on what the document is. An agent’s own contact details appear on the register entry of the company that appointed it.