How Florida's Sunbiz registry works
Florida's Division of Corporations carries over 3.5 million business entity records on Sunbiz, the brand it uses for its public filing index — and the status field that comes back on a quick check is one of seven specific strings, four of which are flavors of inactive. The Division operates under the Florida Department of State and registers Profit Corporations, Non-Profit Corporations, Limited Liability Companies, Professional LLCs, Limited Partnerships, Limited Liability Limited Partnerships, fictitious-name registrations, and trademarks. Search is free, and document images for filings since 1996 are public at no charge.
The status vocabulary published by the Division is: Active, Inactive, Inactive/UA, Inactive/MG, Inactive/CV, Name HS, and Cross Ref. Bare Inactive is the catch-all — an entity that's been administratively dissolved or otherwise stopped existing. Inactive/UA means the name is held during a statutory unavailable period after dissolution. Inactive/MG means merged out; Inactive/CV means converted to another entity type. Name HS and Cross Ref are alternate-name records — a prior name an entity used (Name HS) or the home-state name of a foreign entity that registered in Florida under a different name (Cross Ref). For a KYB decision, the four Inactive* codes are all hard fails, but the suffix tells you which downstream lookup is worth running.
Each entity gets a document number at filing — a 6- or 12-digit numeric string that's the stable identifier across renewals, amendments, and reinstatements. The format mixes lengths, so store it as a string, and any character that looks like an o is actually the digit 0. LLC names must end in Limited Liability Company, L.L.C., or LLC (or the professional variants), be distinguishable on the records of the Department of State, and avoid restricted words — Bank, Trust, Insurance, Savings and Loan, Credit Union — without separate regulator approval. The governing statute is Florida § 605.0112.
What Florida specifically charges and requires
Formation
A Florida LLC costs $125 to form (a $100 Articles of Organization filing fee plus a $25 registered agent designation). A for-profit corporation is $70 ($35 filing plus a $35 agent designation). A limited partnership is $1,000 ($965 plus $35). Standard processing is online through Sunbiz; the Division does not publish a separate expedited tier.
Annual report
Every Florida LLC, corporation, LP, and LLLP must file an annual report by May 1. The fees are flat by entity type — they do not scale with revenue or capitalization.
| Entity type | On-time fee | After May 1 | Late penalty |
|---|---|---|---|
| Limited Liability Company | $138.75 | $538.75 | $400 flat |
| For-Profit Corporation | $150.00 | $550.00 | $400 flat |
| Limited Partnership / LLLP | $500.00 | $900.00 | $400 flat |
| Non-Profit Corporation | $61.25 | $61.25 | exempt |
Miss May 1 and you're late. Miss the third Friday of September and the Division administratively dissolves or revokes the entity at the close of business on the fourth Friday of September. That gives most entities a roughly four-month "late but not dead" window where the record is still on Sunbiz but the entity is out of compliance. Reinstating an LLC costs $100 plus $138.75 per missing report year; reinstating a for-profit corp costs $600 plus $150 per missing year.
Registered agent
The agent must be a Florida resident or a business entity authorized in Florida, with a physical Florida street address — no PO boxes. Deep verification returns the agent on file at Sunbiz, principal place of business, officers and directors or members/managers from the most recent annual report, formation date, and filing history.
Common ways developers use Florida verification
Verify-before-payout for an e-commerce marketplace
Florida has a deep base of single-member LLCs running e-commerce stores, agencies, and service businesses. A marketplace verifies the seller's LLC reads Active on Sunbiz before enabling payouts, and re-checks quarterly to catch entities that drift into Inactive after missing an annual report. A quick check is one credit, fast enough to sit inline in onboarding, and works through Zapier or n8n for teams that don't want to write a client.
Annual-report-aware AI onboarding agent
An onboarding agent reads the Florida quick-check status as part of a verify-before-provision loop run from Claude Code or LangChain. An Active entity provisions. An Inactive/MG entity routes to manual review with a note that the entity merged out — pick up the survivor. A bare Inactive between May 2 and late September is the "late but not dissolved" case; the agent surfaces it with the May 1 annual-report context instead of a generic failure.
Property and holding-company verification
Florida real estate is heavy on single-purpose LLCs — one entity per property, often with non-Florida beneficial owners. Closing platforms and title insurers verify each holding LLC against Sunbiz, pulling the registered agent and principal address. Deep verification returns the agent name, the principal place of business, and the manager from the most recent annual report — the fields a KYB pipeline needs to confirm signing authority.
Cap-table and formation tooling
Cap-table and entity-formation products use deep verification to populate company profiles from the Florida record. The document number, formation date, registered agent, and officers/managers from the latest annual report all come back in one response. Drop the call into a CrewAI crew or a typed Node SDK client, and downstream systems get the same canonical record the Division of Corporations holds.
Frequently asked questions
What does Inactive mean for a Florida entity — and why does the suffix matter?
Florida's Division of Corporations publishes seven status terms. Bare Inactive covers administrative dissolution, voluntary dissolution, and other end states. Inactive/UA means the name is in a post-dissolution holding period and unavailable to a new filer. Inactive/MG means merged out — the entity continues as the survivor of the merger. Inactive/CV means converted to another entity form. For KYB, all four are non-Active, but the suffix tells you what to do next: chase the survivor for MG, the converted entity for CV, or close the case for bare Inactive.
Why is Florida's annual-report late fee a flat $400?
Florida sets the late fee as a flat $400 added to the on-time fee regardless of entity size — an LLC pays $538.75 instead of $138.75, a for-profit corporation pays $550 instead of $150. The dollar amount doesn't scale with revenue or capitalization, which makes "filed on time" a sharp KYB signal: an entity that's late by even one day on a small annual report has measurably failed to keep its administrative state current. Non-profit corporations are exempt from the late fee.
What identifier do you return for a Florida entity?
The jurisdiction_id is the Division of Corporations document number — a 6- or 12-digit numeric string assigned at filing. Store it as a string. Any character on a Sunbiz print-out or PDF that looks like the letter o is actually the digit 0; the Division warns about this directly on its records-search guide. The document number is stable across renewals, name changes (which generate a Name HS record), and reinstatements.
How do you handle foreign LLCs registered in Florida?
Foreign entities authorized to transact business in Florida appear on Sunbiz with the same status vocabulary as domestic ones. If the foreign entity registered under a different name than its home-state name, you'll see a Cross Ref record that ties the Florida-registered alternate name to the home-state name. Deep verification surfaces the home-state name in the response.
How current is Florida entity data?
The Division of Corporations refreshes its database daily. Electronic filings post within roughly three business days; paper filings within five. BizVerify returns the current Sunbiz status at the time the check runs — status changes show up within seconds of the registry updating, and p95 latency tracks the Sunbiz response time itself.
What does deep verification add over a quick check for Florida?
A quick check returns entity name, type, document number, and current Sunbiz status. Deep verification adds the registered agent, principal place of business, formation date, officers and directors (for corporations) or members and managers (for LLCs) from the most recent annual report, and the filing history. Use quick on the hot path for onboarding and re-verification; deep when you need the structured record for a company profile.
Do I get charged for a Florida entity that doesn't exist?
A confirmed "no match" still counts as a quick check (1 credit, roughly $0.08 on public pricing) — the verification ran and proved the entity isn't on Sunbiz. Hard errors from the registry side (timeouts, 5xx) don't consume credits.