The Division of Corporations, UCC and Commissions, part of the Bureau of Corporations, Elections and Commissions at 101 State House Station in Augusta, is the registry for every corporate filing in Maine, and its types of businesses page states its public task plainly: it files all business entity documents required by law and provides information to the public on a business status, directors, officers, members, managers, partners and business purpose. The office is open from eight to five on weekdays with telephone service from ten to five on 207-624-7752, and its business services page lists the lookups side by side: search existing businesses, obtain good standing or legal existence, obtain copies of existing filings.
The search is the Corporate Name Search, which takes a keyword from the name or a charter number and opens an Information Summary page with a list of filings at its foot. The division says the search exists to provide general entity details, strictly prohibits mining data, bars excessive and repeated searches that burden the system, and warns that automated tools of any kind may get a user suspended. Standard and certified copies bought there come as PDF files, retrievable free for fifteen days, and a certified document carries an authentication number at its lower left that an authentication service verifies. For Maine businesses by place, see the Maine county pages.
- June 1: the single deadline for every annual report, filed between January 1 and June 1, with the first report due the year after formation.
- Eighty five, one fifty, fifty: the domestic report, the foreign report, and the penalty added for missing the date.
- Thirty dollars: a certificate of existence, authorization or fact under Title 13-C Section 123, with copies at two dollars a page.
- Two hundred ten dollars: the price on the look alike annual report mailing the Secretary of State warned about in December 2024 and October 2025.
Written by SearchSystems.net from Maine's own systems: the Division of Corporations, UCC and Commissions page, the corporations business services page, the filing an annual report page, the types of businesses page, the filing requirement reminders, the trade name protection page, the business corporation forms and fees, the bulk data page, the Corporate Name Search, the Annual Report Online service, the preprinted annual report form service, the December 13, 2024 warning on misleading solicitations, the October 10, 2025 warning on scams targeting corporations and nonprofits, Title 13-C Section 123 on filing, service and copying fees, Title 13-C Section 1621 on the annual report, Title 13-C Section 1622 on the penalty for a missed report, Title 13-C Section 1421 on administrative dissolution, Title 13-C Section 1422 on reinstatement, each read on October 15, 2026 by the SearchSystems editorial team.
What the annual report puts on the public record
Section 1621 of the Maine Business Corporation Act makes the report the richest part of a Maine record. Every domestic corporation and every foreign corporation authorized here reports its name and jurisdiction, its clerk or registered agent, a brief statement of the character of the business it actually conducts in Maine, its principal office wherever located, the names of its principal officers and of its directors, or of its shareholders where a corporation has eliminated its board, whether it is publicly held, and, for a publicly held domestic corporation, how many female directors sit on its board and whether that meets the minimum in Section 803.
The first report is delivered between January 1 and June 1 of the year after incorporation or authorization and every later report in the same window, which the reminders page turns into dates: articles filed during 2025 owe a first report by June 1, 2026. The division does not mail the form; it is filed through Annual Report Online by card or subscriber account, or printed as a preprinted form from a charter number and mailed to 6 East Chestnut Street in Augusta with a check, and the annual report page urges paper filers near the deadline to have the post office document the mailing date in person.
Religious, charitable, educational and benevolent corporations are exempt, and a domestic corporation that has stopped doing business can file a forty dollar certificate of excuse and stop reporting until a one hundred dollar certificate of resumption.
Eighty five dollars, fifty more after June 1, and the road to dissolution
Section 123 prices the report at eighty five dollars for a domestic corporation and one hundred fifty for a foreign one, with the same figures for an amended report, and adds fifty dollars for failing to deliver it by its due date; the December 2024 warning gives thirty five dollars for a nonprofit. Under Section 1622 the penalty applies as long as the report arrives before administrative dissolution or revocation, a corporation that shows excusable neglect and files within thirty days of learning the report never arrived is excused, and a corporation that neither files nor pays is administratively dissolved, or has its authority revoked if foreign.
Section 1421 sets the procedure: notice by regular mail to the clerk, perfected five days after the postmark, sixty days to correct, then a notice of dissolution reciting the grounds and the date. The dissolved corporation may do nothing except wind up, its clerk keeps authority, and its name stays protected on the register for three years. Section 1422 gives six years to reinstate, for one hundred fifty dollars under Section 123 whatever the ground, with the total for missed reports capped at six hundred dollars however long the delinquency, and the reinstatement relates back as if the dissolution had not occurred.
Certificates of existence and copies at the statutory rates
A certificate of existence, authorization or fact costs thirty dollars under Section 123, and the business services page lists obtaining good standing or legal existence among its online services alongside copies of existing filings. Copying any filed document costs two dollars a page and certifying the copy five dollars. The Corporate Name Search sells both in PDF form, keeps a copy retrievable for fifteen days, and notes that a later retrieval reruns the query and may return different results if the entity has filed something or changed status in between.
The corporation forms page gives the rest of the price list: articles of incorporation one hundred forty five dollars, an amendment fifty, restated articles eighty, articles of dissolution seventy five, a foreign application for authority two hundred fifty, a withdrawal ninety, a name reservation twenty, a registered name twenty dollars a month and two hundred to renew, and a statement of appointment of an agent for a nonfiling domestic entity or nonqualified foreign entity one hundred dollars.
The business services page gave a processing time of ten to fifteen business days when read, while the forms pages still carried forty to fifty five, and the division says filers should confirm by looking for the filing at the foot of the Information Summary rather than by calling.
Trade names at the town office, assumed names at the state
Maine keeps no state register of trade names for sole proprietors or general partnerships. The trade name protection page explains that there is no provision under Maine law for filing them at the state level, and that under Title 31, Sections 1 and 2, partners associating for a mercantile enterprise and a sole proprietor adopting a name other than his own must each deposit a sworn certificate with the clerk of the city or town where the business is carried on before starting.
The division does not check those municipal names for availability and uses its distinguishable upon the record standard only for the entity names and marks it files itself. An entity that wants to trade under another name files an assumed name with the division for one hundred twenty five dollars, or forty dollars for a foreign entity whose legal name is unavailable, and twenty to terminate it. Under Section 6 of Title 31 no business other than a corporation may use the words corporation, incorporated or limited in its name.
A search for a Maine trading name therefore has two halves, the state register for assumed names of entities and the town clerk for everyone else, and the Maine court records guide covers the courts where a name dispute is heard.
The two hundred ten dollar look alike form
On December 13, 2024 Secretary of State Shenna Bellows warned Maine corporations and nonprofits about a mailing from an organization identified as C.F.S. offering to file their annual reports for two hundred ten dollars, on a form that looked like the division own, carried a Gmail address for assistance, and was built from publicly available information; the division uses only maine.gov addresses, mails no annual report form, and would charge eighty five dollars for the domestic report, thirty five for a nonprofit and one hundred fifty for a foreign entity when the 2025 form opened in January.
On October 10, 2025 she reported the same two hundred ten dollar solicitation back in circulation, alongside an overpayment scheme aimed at notaries and marriage officiants, and advised anyone unsure about a mailing to go directly to the division at 207-624-7752 or cec.corporations@maine.gov. The annual report page keeps a standing notice about misleading solicitations above its filing links.
Bulk data, and the limits of a single search
The division will not let the search be used to harvest its register, but it sells the register whole. Through the state portal administrator InforME, the bulk data page prices a monthly file of corporate and UCC records at six hundred dollars, the active and inactive set at one thousand two hundred, the document images at one thousand five hundred, and weekly updates of corporate data at three hundred dollars and images at five hundred, with mark records and images sold separately.
A subscriber account also unlocks multiple report filing and the subscriber side of the name search. What no file or search supplies is the shareholder list: Section 1601 of the corporation act requires a corporation to keep a record of its shareholders by class of shares, but that record is kept by the corporation or its agent, not filed with the state, and the Maine people search guide lists the state sources for the people behind a company.
Questions about looking up a Maine business
Related Maine records
The other Maine guides on this site are the Maine public records law guide for the Freedom of Access Act, the Maine court records guide for the judicial branch records, the Maine property records guide for the registries of deeds, and the Maine county pages for every county office.