The Division of Corporations, a unit of the Delaware Department of State in the John G. Townsend Building at 401 Federal Street in Dover, is the filing office for every Delaware corporation, limited liability company, limited partnership, statutory trust and registered general partnership, and its annual report statistics count more than 2.28 million entities on its books, with 334,461 formed in 2025 alone. The entity search takes an entity name or a file number and returns active and inactive records alike.
What comes back free of charge is listed exactly on the division questions page: the entity name, file number, incorporation or formation date, the registered agent with its address and telephone number, and the entity kind, type and residency. The same page says in plain words that the free result does not provide entity status. Since the division stopped giving filing history over the telephone or through its live chat, a note recorded on its important updates page, anything beyond the free fields is bought online or ordered in writing. Delaware has three counties, and the Delaware pages on this site cover them.
- Ten or twenty dollars: online status alone, or status with the franchise tax assessment, the last five filings, authorized shares and tax due.
- Fifty or one seventy five: the short form certificate of status, or the long form listing every document ever filed with its dates.
- March 1 and June 1: the corporate annual report and franchise tax, then the flat tax on LLCs, LPs and GPs, each with a two hundred dollar penalty.
- Directors yes, owners no: the annual report names every director and the signing officer; shareholders and LLC members are never on file.
Written by SearchSystems.net from Delaware's own systems: the Delaware Division of Corporations home page, the division frequently asked questions, the accessing corporate information page, the online status page, the corporate fee schedule page, the Division of Corporations fee schedule revised August 1, 2026, the annual report and tax instructions, the annual report and tax information page, the franchise tax calculation page, the LLC, LP and GP tax instructions, the expedited services page, the consumer alert on tax and annual report scams, the certificate validation page, the how to form a new business entity guide, the annual report statistics, the important updates page, the entity search, each read on October 15, 2026 by the SearchSystems editorial team.
Two paid status screens, and what the twenty dollar one leaves out
The online status page describes the two things a card payment buys. For ten dollars the screen shows the current status of the entity, with a Status as of date that is the date the entity went into that status, not the date of the query, and the result can be printed from the browser or emailed. For twenty dollars the page adds the last five filings, the franchise tax assessment, the total authorized shares where the entity has shares, and the tax due.
The division is careful about what the twenty dollar screen is not: it returns no images of the documents on record, and the names and addresses of officers and directors live only on the images of the annual reports, so they never appear through this application. The corporate information page adds that every transaction on the site is nonrefundable and that payments over five thousand dollars must go by electronic debit rather than card.
What a certificate of good standing costs and how it is ordered
A paid status screen is not a certificate, and the division says so twice. An official Certificate of Status or Certificate of Good Standing is ordered in writing, either through the Document Filing and Certificate Request Service or by a letter or certification request memo mailed to Dover with a check payable to the Delaware Secretary of State drawn on a United States bank. The short form, which states the entity name and its status on the day of issue, costs fifty dollars; the long form, which lists every document ever filed with its dates and times and any name changes, costs one hundred seventy five.
Orders go out by first class mail unless the requester supplies a Federal Express or UPS account number, and nothing is returned by fax or email. The fee schedule revised August 1, 2026 prices the rest of the record: a record search fifty dollars per entity, a certified copy fifty dollars per document plus two dollars a page, a plain copy ten dollars for the first page and two for each additional page, and plain copies of annual reports at the same ten and two.
Any certificate the division has issued since July 1, 2006 is printed in black ink on plain white paper with the Secretary of State seal and signature, and the validation page lets anyone holding one confirm it online with the file number and the authentication number for one year after issue.
The expedite ladder
Regular work is filed with the date and time it arrived and processed in order of receipt, and the division suggests calling to learn which date is currently being worked before deciding whether to pay for speed. The expedited services page sets four tiers on top of the base fee: one hour service for one thousand dollars on a request received by nine in the evening, two hour service for five hundred dollars by seven, same day service from one hundred to two hundred dollars by two in the afternoon, and next business day service from fifty to one hundred dollars by seven.
On the certificate lines of the fee schedule, same day costs fifty dollars extra on a short form certificate and eighty on a long form, and the twenty four hour rate forty and sixty, each charged per file number. The office itself now sees visitors by appointment only, booked on 302-739-3077, and the preferred in person payment is a check, since the reception desk takes no cards.
The annual report, the franchise tax and the two penalties
Every domestic corporation files an annual report and pays its franchise tax online by March 1 for the prior year, under the annual report and tax instructions, through an application open daily from eight in the morning until a quarter to midnight Eastern time. The report fee is twenty five dollars for an exempt domestic corporation and fifty for a non exempt one, and since the division added the field, every domestic report must state the nature of the business, meaning what the company does to earn revenue.
The tax itself runs from a minimum of one hundred seventy five dollars under the authorized shares method, or four hundred under the assumed par value capital method, to a ceiling of two hundred thousand dollars, or two hundred fifty thousand for a Large Corporate Filer with stock on a national exchange and at least seven hundred fifty million dollars in revenue or assets. A company owing five thousand dollars or more pays in installments, forty percent by June 1, twenty by September 1, twenty by December 1 and the balance by March 1.
Missing the deadline costs a two hundred dollar penalty under Title 8, Section 502(c), plus interest of one and a half percent a month on both tax and penalty under Section 504(c). Foreign corporations file by June 30 for two hundred fifty dollars and owe a further two hundred fifty if late.
The report lists the names and addresses of all the directors as of the filing date and the name and address of the officer who signs it, which is why the questions page sends anyone looking for current officers to the most recent annual report. Tax notices are printed each December and sent to the registered agent, not the company, and the division answers the question of whether an unpaid company dissolves itself with one line: failure to formally close the entity results in penalty and interest charges, and taxes keep accruing until a certificate of dissolution, merger or similar document ends its existence.
The June 1 tax on LLCs, partnerships and trusts
Limited liability companies, limited partnerships and general partnerships file no annual report at all. The alternative entity tax page and the annual report and tax information page put their flat annual tax at four hundred dollars, due by June 1 for the prior year with no proration, and the same two hundred dollar penalty and one and a half percent monthly interest apply. Two older passages still on the site, one answer on the questions page and the formation guide, give the figure as three hundred dollars, and this page reports both because the division has not reconciled them.
For a researcher the practical point is that an LLC record carries no report history, no list of members or managers, and nothing about who owns it, since alternative entities are not required to list members or managers anywhere.
What Delaware does not keep
Shareholders and owners of a corporation are not on file with the division; that information is held by the corporation itself. Bylaws and operating agreements, with their amendments, are kept by the entity and never filed. The division keeps no record of federal employer identification numbers, has no information about old stock certificates, which belong to the company or the transfer agent named on the certificate, and does not recognize S or C status, which is a federal election.
It accepts no complaints and tracks no lawsuits, sending disputes to the Consumer Protection Unit of the Attorney General on 800-220-5424 or to the courts, and it treats a person listed on a filing without their knowledge the same way, as an administrative record it will not referee. A trade name, fictitious name or DBA has been handled by the Division of Revenue through the Delaware One Stop site since February 2, 2026, so it will not show in an entity search, and state trademark registrations, which cost one hundred dollars and run for ten years, cannot be searched online either.
Uniform Commercial Code records are not online and are requested by telephone or through an authorized searcher. For the people behind a Delaware company, the Delaware people search guide lists the state sources, and the Delaware court records guide covers the Court of Chancery, where most disputes between a Delaware company and its owners are heard.
The solicitations the Secretary of State has named
The consumer alert page keeps three examples. On July 6, 2016 a company called Delaware Council for Corporations mailed a form headed 2016 Annual Records Solicitation Form asking corporations to list their shareholders, directors and officers and pay one hundred twenty five dollars by a respond by date, a form the division says is not an official annual report and not recognized by it; Delaware corporations are not required to give the state the names of shareholders or all officers.
On October 23, 2015 a business called Register Delaware mailed a PAST DUE NOTICE invoicing one hundred seventy five dollars for Delaware Domestic Representation, using the Great Seal of Delaware without authority and a return address that was a UPS Store at 1120 L Street NW in Washington, when every Delaware registered agent must have a street address in the state. On August 5, 2013 Corporate Records Service mailed a 2013 Annual Corporate Records Form at the same one hundred twenty five dollars.
The division gives one test for all of them: an official notice from the Division of Corporations carries the Delaware Coat of Arms and the division contact information, and anything about taxes or reports that does not come from the state or the entity registered agent should be viewed with suspicion. A payment already sent goes to the Attorney General Consumer Protection Unit on 302-577-8600.
Questions about looking up a Delaware business
Related Delaware records
The other Delaware guides on this site are the Delaware public records law guide for the Freedom of Information Act, the Delaware court records guide for the Court of Chancery and the Superior Court, the Delaware background check guide for the State Bureau of Identification, and the Delaware pages for New Castle, Kent and Sussex counties.