The Business Services Division of the Ohio Secretary of State, at 180 Civic Center Drive in Columbus and on 877-767-6446, files the articles, agent appointments, amendments and dissolutions of Ohio corporations, limited liability companies and partnerships, and the businesses page points to an online business search, to the Ohio Business Data Portal for new formation data, and to its certificates of good standing and business reports. The office website answered a security block to this server on reading day, so the rules and fees below come from the Ohio Revised Code on the Legislative Service Commission site and from copies of the office own pages held by the Internet Archive.
The most important thing to know before reading an Ohio record is what it will not contain. The fee section lists a biennial report only for partnerships, limited liability partnerships and professional associations, and a statement of continued existence only for nonprofit corporations; a business corporation or limited liability company files no periodic report at all, and the filing history on its record is made up of whatever it chose to file. For Ohio businesses by place, see the Ohio county pages.
- No annual report: business corporations and LLCs file nothing on a calendar; only partnerships and professional associations file a twenty five dollar biennial report.
- Thirty days after notice: the time a corporation has to replace a lost statutory agent before the Secretary of State cancels its articles.
- Five dollars: the seal on a certificate of good standing or any other certificate, with copies of filed papers at up to a dollar a page.
- Thirty nine dollars, five years: the cost and term of a registered trade name or a reported fictitious name.
Written by SearchSystems.net from Ohio's own systems: the Ohio Secretary of State businesses page, the filing forms and fee schedule page, the fraudulent filing complaint page, the protect your business page, the Ohio business search, Section 111.16 of the Ohio Revised Code on Secretary of State fees, Section 1701.07 on the statutory agent and cancellation of articles, Section 1701.922 on the effect of reinstatement, Section 1706.09 on the agent of a limited liability company, Section 1329.01 on trade names and fictitious names, Section 1329.04 on the five year term, each read on October 15, 2026 by the SearchSystems editorial team.
The statutory agent, and the thirty day cancellation
Section 1701.07 requires every corporation to have and maintain a statutory agent, a natural person resident in Ohio or an entity with a business address here, on whom process may be served. The written appointment gives the agent name and Ohio street address, the primary residence of an individual or the usual place of business of an entity, and a usual place of business means a place open in normal hours where someone authorized to accept service is generally present, never a post office box however it is dressed.
When an agent dies, moves away or resigns, the corporation must appoint another at once; when the agent address changes, the agent or corporation must file the new one. The teeth are in division (M). If the corporation does not appoint a new agent or file the change of address, the Secretary of State mails notice to the corporation at its email address, the address in the resignation or the address on its last franchise tax return, and unless the default is cured within thirty days of the mailing the articles are canceled without further notice, with a notation on the record and a monthly list of cancellations sent to the tax commissioner.
Section 1706.09 imposes the same agent on every limited liability company and foreign LLC registered here. The Secretary of State keeps a record of every corporation and its agent, which is the record the search returns.
Reinstatement within two years, and what it restores
A corporation whose articles were canceled under Section 1701.07 may be reinstated by filing, within two years of the cancellation, an application for reinstatement with the required appointment of agent or statement of change, and paying the fee in division (Q) of Section 111.16, twenty five dollars for the reinstatement of an entity canceled by operation of law, by the Secretary of State, by order of the Department of Taxation or by a court.
Section 1701.922 says what reinstatement does: every right, privilege and franchise of the corporation, including its property, credits and contracts, vests again as if the articles had never been canceled, an officer or employee who acted for the corporation in the gap without knowing of the cancellation binds it as if it had existed, and the corporation alone is liable for those acts. The section calls itself remedial and asks to be read liberally.
For a researcher that means an Ohio record showing cancellation and reinstatement describes an entity whose existence is treated as continuous, and the dates between them still show on the filing history.
Five dollars for the seal, a dollar a page for the papers
Section 111.16 prices the proof. Creating and affixing the seal of the office to a good standing or other certificate costs five dollars, and copies of any certificate or paper filed in the office cost not more than one dollar a page, with no charge for copies state officers need; a certificate under one of the merger and conversion sections it lists costs twenty five dollars with the seal. The same section prices the filings a search may show: ninety nine dollars for articles of incorporation of a corporation without shares, or for shares ten cents each up to a thousand on a sliding scale down to a quarter cent, between ninety nine dollars and one hundred thousand; ninety nine dollars for articles of organization of a limited liability company, a foreign LLC registration, a limited partnership certificate or a foreign corporation license; fifty dollars for an amendment, a certificate of dissolution or cancellation, or a restatement; twenty five dollars for a change, resignation or address change of agent, or one hundred twenty five plus three dollars an entity for a multiple agent update; thirty nine dollars to reserve a name or claim exclusive right to one; and fifty dollars to have a document examined before filing.
The archived fee schedule page says every form can be filed at Ohio Business Central, that paper filings must be single sided letter size because they are scanned, and that every filing except preclearance, certificate and UCC requests can be expedited for an additional fee stated on the form, delivered to the Client Service Center or mailed to Post Office Box 1390 in Columbus.
Trade names and fictitious names, both on the state file
Ohio registers the names a business trades under. Section 1329.01 distinguishes a trade name, a name used in business to which the user asserts a right of exclusive use, from a fictitious name, one the user has not registered or cannot register as a trade name, and provides for both. A trade name registration gives the applicant name and business address, the form and home state of an entity applicant or a partner of a partnership, the name, the general nature of the business and how long the name has been used in Ohio, for a filing fee of thirty nine dollars.
Anyone doing business under a fictitious name who does not or cannot register it must instead report its use within thirty days of first use, on a form giving the user name and address, the fictitious name and the nature of the business, for the same thirty nine dollars. Under Section 1329.04 a registration or report runs five years, renewable in the six months before it expires, with the office notifying the holder by mail or email in that window, and a general partnership must renew whenever a named partner leaves.
Neither the record of a corporation, LLC, limited partnership or LLP formed under the entity chapters counts as a fictitious name, so a trading name search in Ohio means the trade name index rather than the entity index.
Fraudulent filings and the office that undoes them
The archived fraudulent filing complaint page describes a remedy few states offer. Someone who believes a business filing was made without authority, or used a name or address without consent, may complain to the Public Integrity Division of the Secretary of State, which investigates and decides whether the filing is fraudulent; only complaints about specific filings already on the record are accepted, and scams and consumer complaints go to the Attorney General.
A business formed without authorization or for a fraudulent purpose is permanently canceled and the names and addresses used without consent are redacted from the public record. A fraudulent filing on an existing business is canceled, the information it added is redacted and the data reverted to what it was, and a status changed by the filing is restored. The office keeps a protect your business page as a game plan against what it calls bad actors looking to disrupt or profit from a business.
For the person level checks a business record never performs, the Ohio background check guide covers the Bureau of Criminal Investigation.
What an Ohio record does and does not settle
Because there is no annual report, an Ohio corporation record names its incorporators and agent and whatever officers appear on later filings, but carries no yearly statement of officers or directors, and an LLC record names its agent and organizer and nothing about members or managers unless they chose to file a statement of authority, which Section 111.16 prices at fifty dollars. Good standing is therefore a narrower claim in Ohio than elsewhere: it means the entity has not been canceled or dissolved and has an agent on file, not that it has reported anything recently.
Tax standing is held by the Department of Taxation, which can itself order a cancellation, and franchise tax returns supply the address the Secretary of State uses for agent notices. For a dispute over an Ohio company, the Ohio court records guide covers the county clerks of courts and the Supreme Court case search.
Questions about looking up a Ohio business
Related Ohio records
The other Ohio guides on this site are the Ohio public records law guide for the Public Records Act, the Ohio court records guide for the county clerks of courts, the Ohio property records guide for the county recorders and auditors, and the Ohio county pages for every county office.