US Company Data Suppliers: An Editorial Buyer's Guide

The buyer situation in the United States

Anyone running compliance, lending, or due diligence work in the United States hits the same structural problem almost immediately: there is no single US company registry. There are more than 50 of them.

Every state, the District of Columbia, and several US territories operates its own Secretary of State (SoS) office. Each one sets its own rules for what data it collects, how it labels that data, whether it publishes it online, whether it charges for access, and whether it offers bulk downloads or APIs. Florida lists officer names and makes annual-report images downloadable at no charge. Delaware, the most popular state for incorporation, deliberately excludes officer and director details from public search results. Texas charges $1 per search through SOSDirect. California offers free PDF access to 17 million+ imaged documents through its Bizfile Online portal. New York publishes multiple entity datasets on its open data portal. Illinois, until recently, criminalized web scraping of business records.

Above the state layer sit several federal data systems, each covering a different slice of US business life. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR database covers roughly 7,500 companies registered with the SEC, mostly public. The Internal Revenue Service issues Employer Identification Numbers (EINs) to virtually every US employer and nonprofit, but the IRS does not make EINs publicly searchable in bulk. FinCEN launched its Beneficial Ownership Information (BOI) reporting system under the Corporate Transparency Act in January 2024, then in March 2025 issued an interim final rule that removed the reporting requirement for all US domestic entities, leaving only foreign companies registered to do business in the United States subject to BOI filing. The result is that what was supposed to centralize UBO data for 32+ million domestic entities has been largely retracted, at least for now. [VERIFY: The interim final rule published March 26, 2025 is subject to a notice-and-comment period; Treasury stated it intends to finalize the rule in 2025-2026. Check FinCEN’s BOI page for updates before citing current state in regulatory filings.]

The private-sector response to this fragmentation is a layered market. National data aggregators such as LexisNexis Accurint, Thomson Reuters CLEAR, and TLO stitch together state registry data, court records, utility records, and other public records into unified search platforms. Credit bureaus Dun and Bradstreet and Experian Business built the US commercial credit infrastructure over decades and hold the dominant positions for business credit risk. Open-data aggregators such as OpenCorporates normalized state-level registry data across all 50 states into a searchable, API-accessible database. Specialist UBO and beneficial-ownership providers such as Sayari and Moody’s Bureau van Dijk (Orbis) built structured ownership graphs layered over whatever public registry filings they can source.

The US market is more fragmented and more expensive to cover than any equivalent-sized jurisdiction. A legitimate nationwide corporate data subscription with reasonable depth easily runs into the tens of thousands of dollars annually, because the underlying source fragmentation is the buyer’s problem to solve.

This guide covers the six supplier categories a serious US compliance buyer needs to understand.

The 6 supplier categories

The US market is not a flat list of competitors. It is a stack of overlapping layers: 50+ state registries at the base, federal systems above them, national aggregators on top, credit bureaus running parallel, and specialist UBO providers alongside.

1. Secretary of State registries (50-state direct access)

Every US business entity is registered at the state level. The SoS offices of Delaware, California, New York, Texas, and Florida are the most relevant reference points because they account for a disproportionate share of US incorporations and registered agents.

Delaware Division of Corporations is the world’s preferred incorporation jurisdiction for US businesses, holding roughly 1.8 million entities as of recent figures. The public search portal charges $10 per entity for status or $20 for fuller information including filing history and current franchise tax assessment. Certified copies of documents run $50 for a short-form certificate of good standing or $175 for a long-form certificate. Officer and director names are not publicly listed in Delaware search results by default; buyers who need them must pull the actual filed documents, which carry per-page fees.

California Secretary of State runs Bizfile Online, which provides free PDF access to filed documents across more than 17 million imaged filings. The portal is free for basic search and document access. California publishes more officer and director information than Delaware.

Texas Secretary of State operates SOSDirect at $1 per search (waived when an order follows the search). Filing copies and certified documents carry additional fees.

Florida provides officer and authorized-person lookups free and makes annual-report images downloadable at no charge.

New York publishes open datasets including Corporations and Other Entities records through its state open-data portal, though the breadth of fields varies by dataset.

The challenge with direct SoS access is that there is no unified identifier, no consistent field naming, no common status vocabulary, and no standard API. Each portal is its own product. A buyer who needs to verify the status of 200 entities across 20 states must either operate 20 separate accounts and workflows, or buy from a national aggregator.

Best-fit buyers for direct SoS access are legal teams and auditors who need the official certified document for a specific jurisdiction, compliance officers running a small-volume one-off check in a state where the portal is free or cheap, and any buyer who needs chain-of-custody documentation from the originating registry rather than a derived reseller copy.

2. National aggregators (LexisNexis Accurint, Thomson Reuters CLEAR, TLO)

National public-records aggregators solve the fragmentation problem by ingesting state registry data, federal records, court filings, property records, utility records, and many other sources into a unified platform. The three dominant names in the US compliance and investigative market are LexisNexis Accurint, Thomson Reuters CLEAR, and TransUnion’s TLO.

LexisNexis Accurint, part of LexisNexis Risk Solutions within the RELX Group, is the most widely deployed platform for identity resolution, public records investigation, and entity linking at scale. Its coverage spans state corporate records, court documents, property records, professional licenses, and sanctions data. It integrates with LexisNexis’s broader identity and fraud products. Accurint is sold through enterprise contracts with per-search or seat-based pricing; pricing is not published publicly and is negotiated through a sales process.

Thomson Reuters CLEAR combines corporate registry data, court records, government records, and open-source intelligence into investigation-focused workflows. CLEAR differentiates through its integration with Thomson Reuters’s legal and regulatory ecosystem, including Westlaw. Pricing follows a desktop-access model with monthly commitments configurable around user counts, content packages, and API or batch add-ons. Per-search or per-search-tier pricing is not publicly listed.

TLO, owned by TransUnion, operates at the intersection of public records and consumer identity data, with coverage spanning business records, addresses, phone numbers, and court records. TLO serves a similar buyer profile to Accurint but is generally positioned toward collections, insurance, and law enforcement adjacent use cases in addition to general compliance.

All three platforms are priced by enterprise contract. A compliance team at a mid-size bank or financial institution should budget from $30,000 to well over $100,000 annually depending on user count, volume, and data package depth. The value proposition is the unified search across 50 states in a single query, with entity resolution that links corporate records to individuals, addresses, and related entities.

Best-fit buyers are AML compliance teams, investigative units, fraud teams, and legal professionals who run multi-jurisdictional lookups daily and for whom the 50-state fragmentation of direct SoS access is an operational barrier.

3. Dun and Bradstreet

Dun and Bradstreet (D&B) is the dominant US commercial credit bureau and has been since its founding in 1841. The D-U-N-S Number, D&B’s proprietary nine-digit business identifier, has become the de facto standard business ID in US commerce, accepted by federal government procurement, financial institutions, and Fortune 500 procurement teams. D&B’s database covers more than 300 million entities globally.

The core D&B product for US buyers is the Business Information Report (BIR), which packages company registration data, PAYDEX payment score, financial stress indicators, trade payment history, public filings, and predictive analytics. A single BIR is listed at $189.99; a 25-pack runs $3,799.99 (approximately $152 per report). The Credit Evaluator Plus ranges from $61.99 for one to $3,719.99 for a 100-pack. Enterprise subscribers access D&B through the D&B Finance Analytics platform and D&B Hoovers for sales intelligence, with contracts priced on annual commitment and volume.

The PAYDEX score, scaled 0-100, is D&B’s signature product and has no direct equivalent at any other US commercial bureau. It reflects payment behavior based on trade lines contributed by suppliers, vendors, and creditors. For a buyer assessing a US vendor, contractor, or counterparty on payment reliability, D&B’s PAYDEX is the standard reference.

D&B’s coverage on private companies is deeper than any other commercial bureau because it has been building its file through trade-line contributions and supplier data since before the internet. For smaller businesses, coverage depth varies: a startup with no trade lines may have a thin D&B file even if it has a D-U-N-S number.

Best-fit buyers are credit managers, accounts receivable teams, government procurement officers (D-U-N-S is required for US federal contracting), corporate treasury teams assessing counterparty credit, and any buyer whose primary question is “will this company pay its bills.”

4. Experian Business

Experian Business is the second largest US commercial credit bureau and the primary alternative to D&B for business credit data. Experian’s flagship business scoring product is the Intelliscore Plus, scaled 1-100, which aggregates more than 800 data points including credit obligations, legal filings, payment trends, and business demographic variables. Experian Business tracks more than 27 million active US businesses.

Experian’s retail-facing pricing is published clearly for small-business buyers: a single CreditScore Report is $49.95; a ProfilePlus Report including trade payment detail, inquiry detail, and UCC filings is $59.95; the Business Credit Advantage subscription runs $199 per year for unlimited access to the buyer’s own business report with daily monitoring. For buyers checking multiple businesses, the Business CreditScore Pro plan is $1,495 per year for up to 30 reports per month, with additional reports at $15 each.

Experian’s Intelliscore Plus differs from D&B’s PAYDEX in that it blends payment behavior, credit usage, public records, and business demographic signals rather than focusing exclusively on payment history. For newer businesses without an established trade-payment record, Experian’s model can incorporate owner personal credit as a blended signal, which is useful when assessing younger companies. The Financial Stability Risk Rating, included in higher-tier Experian reports, predicts the likelihood of severe delinquency or charge-off over the next 12 months.

At the enterprise level, Experian Business integrates with its commercial data enrichment, decisioning analytics, and identity verification products. Enterprise buyers access Experian through its business information API, with contract pricing not publicly listed.

Best-fit buyers are lenders evaluating business creditworthiness, procurement teams assessing vendor payment risk, fintech platforms embedding credit decisioning, and any buyer who wants a PAYDEX-equivalent score on a business that has not yet built a deep D&B trade-line file.

5. OpenCorporates

OpenCorporates operates the world’s largest open database of company information, covering more than 200 million companies across 145+ jurisdictions. For US buyers, OpenCorporates aggregates data from all 50 state registries into a standardized, searchable database, resolving the format inconsistencies and incompatible status vocabularies across state portals.

The data OpenCorporates provides for US entities is registry-sourced: company name, registration number, entity type, status, registered agent, and (where the state publishes it) officer and director information. OpenCorporates does not add credit scoring, court records, or trade-payment data. It is a registry-layer aggregator, not a credit bureau or investigative platform.

OpenCorporates offers a free API with usage limits for open-data and nonprofit use. Commercial API tiers are priced annually and published in GBP: Essentials at GBP 2,250, Starter at GBP 6,600, and Basic at GBP 12,000 per year, with Enterprise priced on application. The API returns structured JSON with source provenance for each field, which is useful for compliance teams that need to log where each data point originated.

For US company data specifically, OpenCorporates’s coverage heatmap (last updated August 2025) assigns an average quality score of 31 out of 100 across US states, reflecting the underlying fragmentation: basic registration data is generally present, but officer detail, UBO data, and financial filings are inconsistently available because many state registries do not publish them.

OpenCorporates is not a substitute for D&B, Experian, or the national investigative platforms. It is the best available structured API layer over the US state registry patchwork for buyers who need registry-level company status, entity type, and registration history in a standardized format without the per-search cost of state portal lookups.

Best-fit buyers are KYB (Know Your Business) platforms, compliance tech vendors embedding registry check into onboarding flows, researchers and journalists doing investigative work across jurisdictions, and procurement teams who need a lightweight entity-existence and status check rather than a full credit or investigative report.

6. UBO and beneficial-ownership specialists (Sayari, Moody’s Orbis)

The beneficial-ownership gap in US company data is the most acute structural problem in the market. State registries generally do not require disclosure of ultimate beneficial owners; they record registered agents, officers, and directors, which may or may not be the actual controlling persons. The Corporate Transparency Act was intended to address this by creating a federal BOI registry at FinCEN, but the March 2025 interim final rule exempted all US domestic entities from the reporting requirement, leaving the BOI system with coverage limited to foreign companies registered in the US. [VERIFY: Check FinCEN BOI page for any updates after March 2025, including whether the interim final rule has been finalized or further modified.]

Commercial UBO providers fill this gap through a combination of state registry filings, SEC EDGAR ownership disclosures, international registry data, corporate filings, news sources, and their own research. The two leading names for US compliance buyers are Sayari and Moody’s Bureau van Dijk Orbis.

Sayari was built from the ground up for investigative and compliance use cases, combining corporate data, trade records, and maritime information with graph analytics. Its coverage spans more than 250 jurisdictions and 2.3 billion company records. Sayari is used by US government agencies for trade compliance, export control, and sanctions enforcement, and by financial institutions for AML and sanctions screening. Pricing is enterprise-contract only; market reporting suggests starting engagement costs of $50,000 or more annually.

Moody’s Orbis covers more than 450 million companies globally, with structured financial and ownership data designed for regulatory compliance, audit, and risk modeling. Orbis is the standard reference for institutional buyers who need a structured global ownership graph, particularly for correspondent banking relationships, investment screening, and anti-corruption due diligence. Orbis pricing starts at approximately $20,000 per year for limited access and can exceed $100,000 annually for full global capability.

Both platforms flag a hard limitation for US private companies: where state registries do not publish officer or beneficial-owner data (Delaware being the most prominent example), and where FinCEN BOI is not populated with domestic-company data, the ownership chain for a US LLC or closely-held corporation may simply not be available in any public or semi-public registry. Commercial providers fill gaps through inference, news monitoring, and aggregation of secondary sources, but they cannot manufacture registry-authoritative UBO where none was filed.

Best-fit buyers are financial institutions with correspondent-banking or sanctions-screening requirements, government agencies doing trade compliance and export control, AML platforms that need ownership-graph overlays on top of entity-identity matching, and M&A due diligence buyers who need to trace beneficial ownership of a US target through a layered holding structure.

Comparison matrix

How to choose

The US market requires a different decision framework than a single-registry jurisdiction like Malaysia, Australia, or the UK. Because no single source covers the whole US business population with consistent depth, the question is not “which supplier” but “which combination covers my use case.”

Three structural facts should anchor the decision.

First, the credit question and the registry question are served by different infrastructure. D&B and Experian Business are the credit-first tools. SoS registries, OpenCorporates, and national aggregators are the registry-first tools. UBO specialists are the ownership-graph tools. A buyer who conflates these will either over-spend on a credit platform for registry lookups or under-document with a registry tool for credit decisions.

Second, the FinCEN BOI gap is real and will remain real for the foreseeable future. The March 2025 interim final rule means no new UBO data on domestic US entities is flowing into the federal BOI system. A compliance program that was counting on FinCEN BOI to answer beneficial-ownership questions for US counterparties needs a commercial UBO provider or must rely on SEC EDGAR (for public companies only), state-filed ownership documents (where states require them, which is rare), and judgment based on secondary sources.

Third, volume drives economics more sharply in the US than in jurisdictions with a single unified registry. At low volume (fewer than 20 entity checks per month), direct SoS portal access plus a self-service D&B or Experian Business subscription covers most needs. At medium volume (20-200 per month), a national aggregator or OpenCorporates API starts to pay for itself in saved researcher time. At high volume (200+ per month), enterprise contracts with bundled API access dominate on per-unit cost.

Three personas illustrate the decision. A US bank AML team running ongoing KYC on a commercial book needs: a national aggregator (Accurint or CLEAR) for the entity and individual investigation layer, a D&B enterprise contract for PAYDEX and business-credit signals, and a UBO specialist (Sayari or Orbis) for ownership-graph checks on higher-risk accounts. A fintech onboarding US businesses for payment processing needs: OpenCorporates or a KYB API for entity existence and status, Experian Business CreditScore Pro for the credit screen, and direct SoS pulls for the occasional certified document required in a dispute. A foreign company doing M&A due diligence on a US target needs: an Orbis or Sayari ownership trace, SEC EDGAR for public-company subsidiary financials, direct Delaware SoS pulls for certified good-standing certificates, and either a D&B or Experian Business credit pull for the target’s payment-risk profile.

The FinCEN BOI situation explained

The Corporate Transparency Act (CTA), enacted in 2021, was the largest US beneficial-ownership transparency reform in a generation. It directed FinCEN to establish a BOI registry and required most US companies to file the names, addresses, dates of birth, and identification numbers of their beneficial owners. FinCEN opened the BOI filing system on January 1, 2024.

What happened next was unusual. A series of federal court injunctions in late 2024 temporarily suspended enforcement. Treasury suspended enforcement on March 2, 2025. FinCEN then published an interim final rule on March 26, 2025, which took a structurally different step: it revised the definition of “reporting company” to cover only foreign entities registered to do business in the US, exempting all US domestic entities. All entities formed under the law of any US state, regardless of size, are now exempt from BOI reporting.

Foreign companies registered in the US before March 26, 2025, were required to file BOI reports by April 25, 2025. Foreign companies registered on or after March 26, 2025, must file within 30 calendar days of registration. Foreign reporting companies are not required to report US persons as beneficial owners.

The practical effect: the FinCEN BOI database covers foreign-owned US-registered entities but not the roughly 36+ million domestic US businesses that were originally in scope. A commercial UBO provider with a FinCEN data feed gets ownership data only on the foreign-company slice. For domestic entities, the ownership gap remains as large as it was before the CTA was enacted.

[VERIFY: The interim final rule was published for public comment. FinCEN stated it intends to finalize the rule in 2025-2026. Any revision could expand or narrow the current domestic exemption. Check https://www.fincen.gov/boi for the current status before citing in regulatory or compliance documentation.]

Compliance posture: OFAC, FATF, and the federal layer

US compliance buyers operate under a regulatory framework that differs from most comparable jurisdictions in one key respect: the federal sanctions infrastructure is both more extensive and more actively enforced than in most other markets.

OFAC maintains the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) and other sanctions lists that apply to any US person or US-nexus transaction. OFAC sanctions screening is not optional and is not served by any of the registry-layer tools above; it requires a dedicated sanctions screening product or API, either from a specialist (Sayari, World-Check, Dow Jones Risk and Compliance) or embedded within a national aggregator platform.

FATF Recommendation 24 sets the global standard for corporate transparency and beneficial-ownership disclosure. The US was subject to a FATF evaluation in 2016 that found corporate transparency to be a material weakness. The CTA was partly a response to that finding. With the March 2025 narrowing, the US’s compliance with FATF R.24 on domestic entities is again an open question, which FATF is expected to assess in the next US mutual evaluation.

The Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) and its implementing regulations remain the primary AML framework for US financial institutions. FinCEN’s Customer Due Diligence rule (31 CFR 1010.230), separately from the CTA, still requires covered financial institutions to identify and verify the beneficial owners of legal entity customers at account opening. That rule uses a different threshold and scope than the CTA and was not changed by the March 2025 interim final rule. Financial institutions cannot rely on the domestic CTA exemption to reduce their own CDD obligations.

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Frequently asked questions

Is there a single US company registry?

No. The US has more than 50 state-level registries operated by individual Secretary of State offices plus US territories. There is no unified federal company registry equivalent to the UK Companies House, Australia’s ASIC, or Singapore’s ACRA. The closest federal layer is SEC EDGAR, but it covers only publicly registered companies, roughly 7,500 entities out of more than 36 million total US businesses.

Can I verify a US company’s beneficial owners?

For foreign companies registered in the US, yes, through FinCEN’s BOI system following the March 2025 interim final rule. For US domestic entities, the FinCEN BOI exemption means no federal UBO registry is available. Commercial UBO providers (Sayari, Orbis) source ownership data from SEC filings for public companies, from state-level documents where available, and from secondary sources for private companies, but the underlying data is sparse for closely held US entities where the ultimate owners chose their state of incorporation partly to avoid disclosure.

What is the difference between D&B and Experian Business?

Both are commercial credit bureaus, but they score differently. D&B’s PAYDEX focuses on trade-payment history and is the standard for vendor and supplier credit assessment. Experian’s Intelliscore Plus blends payment behavior, credit usage, public records, and business demographics. D&B has deeper coverage on established businesses with long trade-line histories. Experian can incorporate owner personal credit for younger businesses. Most large lenders and procurement programs use both rather than choosing one. For detailed comparison, see the D&B vs Experian Business head-to-head article.

What does SEC EDGAR actually cover?

EDGAR covers companies that register securities with the SEC or file periodic reports under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. That population is primarily US public companies and certain large private-sector issuers. SEC estimates the active EDGAR company database holds over 500,000 records, but the bulk of meaningful filings come from the roughly 7,500 currently registered public companies. Private companies do not appear in EDGAR unless they have issued registered securities or filed for an IPO.

What should I do if I need a certified US company document for a court or regulator?

Go directly to the state Secretary of State office for the state of incorporation. Order a certified certificate of good standing or certified copy of the certificate of formation or incorporation. Delaware certified documents are $50 (short form) to $175 (long form); other states vary. Reseller or aggregator copies, while useful for operational checks, do not carry the chain of custody that comes with an officially sealed state-issued certificate.

Is FinCEN BOI useful for compliance buyers?

Currently limited, given the March 2025 interim final rule. The BOI system now contains data only for foreign companies registered in the US that filed before or after the April 25, 2025 deadline. For US domestic entities, no BOI data flows through FinCEN under the current rule. Compliance buyers whose BSA/AML programs require UBO identification for US legal entity customers must continue to rely on the FinCEN CDD rule (31 CFR 1010.230) and commercial UBO providers rather than the BOI registry.