Oregon Business Search

What the Oregon business search shows

The Oregon Secretary of State business name search finds a company by business name or registry number. It finds a company by business name or registry number. Use it to confirm a company exists and is active, not to get its federal number.

Oregon has its own trap: the Secretary of State says the state does not issue resale numbers and tells businesses to use their business registry number to buy wholesale. That registry number is not an EIN.

The Oregon registry number

The Oregon Secretary of State Corporation Division gives every company a registry number when it is formed. It identifies the company in state records, and it is not the company’s EIN.

Check if an Oregon LLC is active

Search the company in the Oregon business search and open its record. The status tells you whether the state counts the company as active. Words such as dissolved, revoked, forfeited, inactive or delinquent mean it is not in good standing, usually because an annual filing or fee was missed, and the company may need to be reinstated before it can do business there.

To prove a company is in good standing to a bank, a lender or another state, order a Certificate of Existence from the Oregon Secretary of State Corporation Division. Our LLC status check reads the status from public data where a state publishes it.

Good to know in Oregon

• Oregon has no sales tax at all, so there is no seller's permit to obtain and no sales tax account to open. For a product business arriving from almost any other state, the registration list is shorter than expected: the EIN and the payroll registration are the whole of it.
• Oregon's LLC annual report is due on the anniversary of the formation date each year rather than on a fixed statewide date, and the Secretary of State sends the renewal notice to the registered agent. An LLC formed on the 3rd of a month renews on the 3rd of that month every year.
• Oregon's Corporate Activity Tax is a separate tax on commercial activity above a statewide threshold, registered with the Department of Revenue independently of income tax. It applies to LLCs and sole proprietors as well as corporations despite the name, so larger Oregon LLCs hold a CAT registration alongside the EIN.

Questions

More for Oregon companies

• Oregon EIN lookup: where a company’s federal number can be found.
• EIN for an Oregon business: what Oregon asks for after the EIN.
• LLC name check and LLC status check.
• Business search in other states.