California Secretary of State

The California Secretary of State governs California business filings. Whether it’s a California corporation, California LLC, California nonprofit, or any type of business entity; you create or register your company with the California Secretary of State.

California Secretary of State

Contact info - Sacramento Office:
Voice: (916) 657-5448
Office hours for Sacramento location are Monday through Friday - 8:00am to 5:00pm

Physical Address:
1500 11th St.
Sacramento, CA 95814

Regional offices:
Office hours for all regional office locations are Monday through Friday - 8:00am to 5:00pm

San Francisco Regional Office
455 Golden Gate Ave., Suite 14500
San Francisco, CA 94102-7007
(415) 557-8000                                  

Los Angeles Regional Office
300 South Spring St., Room 12513
Los Angeles, CA 90013-1233
(213) 897-3062                                  

San Diego Regional Office
1350 Front St., Suite 2060
San Diego, CA 92101-3609
(619) 525-4113

Name search:

You can start your California business yourself, but if you would like help doing so, you can sign up for our business formation services.

Pros

• The best thing about doing business in California is that there will always be millions of people that could be your potential clients.
• You can file corporation statements of information online.

Cons

• Why on earth can you file corporation statements of information online, but you can’t file LLCs. Seriously; it’s like someone there is just plain screwing with you.
• The name searches you do online are two weeks old.  The CA SOS only updates their website every other week with new filings. They are also taking 4-8 weeks to process filings, so you could do a name search, think your new business name is ok, pay the $400 expedite fees because you don’t want to wait two months, and get denied because you couldn’t see an accurate list of filed company names. Then the state will keep your expedite fees, just to deny you, and if you resubmit, you’ll have to pay the same criminally high expedited fees again.  (I’m not making this up.)
• The obvious most annoying thing for small businesses in California is the minimum $800 franchise tax payment even if your business was not profitable. The icing on the cake is that you are supposed to PRE-PAY this.  So if you form your company in June, you are supposed to immediately send in payment to prepay your estimated tax.  You get charged a penalty if you do not do this.
• The CA Franchise Tax board will always send your notices to random addresses, not appropriate your tax payments correctly, and then send you all kinds of late notices and penalties for taxes you did pay, but they can’t figure out where they put the money.