us-business-registry-open-data
US Business Registry Open Data
Overview
Several US states publish their entire business registry — every LLC, corporation, and nonprofit ever registered — as open data on Socrata portals, explicitly in the public domain or licensed for commercial use. Five states (New York, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Connecticut) yield ~12.4 million entities with names, entity types, formation dates, addresses, and registered agents, for free, via a documented API. Most people assume this data is locked behind OpenCorporates pricing or state paywalls; for these states, it isn't.
This skill contains the verified dataset registry (endpoints, record counts, license terms), a working config-driven fetcher (scripts/fetch_us_business_entities.py, Python stdlib, no dependencies), the measured rate-limit realities nobody documents, and the gotchas that silently corrupt naive pulls.
When to Use
Use when: you need bulk US company registration data with commercial-use rights; building lead lists, formation-trend analysis, registered-agent market maps, entity matching, or cohort survival studies; evaluating whether to pay OpenCorporates or a data vendor (check the free floor first).
Skip when: you need business license data (different registries — Washington and Illinois publish licenses, not registrations); you need SEC filings or officers/UBO data beyond what states expose; you need full national coverage including Delaware/California/Texas — no free path exists, budget for a vendor.