Alabama Registered Agent
When you choose Northwest as your Alabama Registered Agent, you get instant service, a business address, and free mail forwarding. And when you want more? Northwest is the only registered agent that can provide your business services from domains to DBAs easily, and all in-house.
Want to learn more about what a registered agent does in Alabama? We'll explain the Alabama Secretary of State’s requirements, what your registered agent should do for you, and how to change your registered agent in Alabama.
When You Want More
$125 a Year Every Year
Northwest is the choice of professionals for registered agent service.
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Use Our Address, Not Yours
- One Year of Free Domain Registration
- 90 Day Trial of Website, Phone & Email Services
- Business Address & Free Mail Forwarding
- Same-Day Scans, Instant Notifications
- On Call Business Experts
What Is an Alabama Registered Agent?
An Alabama registered agent is a person or company you designate to receive legal mail, like service of process (legal notification of a lawsuit), on behalf of your business. Registered agents exist to provide an official and reliable way to contact your business.
If your business is ever served with a lawsuit, the process server will deliver the paperwork directly to your registered agent. At that point, your business is legally considered served. The registered agent should then forward you your mail, quickly and securely.
Per Alabama’s state statutes (AL Code § 10A-1-5.31), registered agents are legally required in Alabama. At a minimum, your registered agent must list a physical address on the public record and be present at that address during business hours. But ideally, your registered agent should do more.
What Are the Legal Requirements for AL Registered Agents?
- A registered agent in Alabama has to be a state resident or a company that provides registered agent services.
- The agent must maintain a registered office at a physical address within Alabama’s borders.
- The registered agent must accept legal documents for your company.
How Do I Change My Registered Agent in Alabama?
Changing your registered agent is a straightforward process:
- You’ll file a change of agent form with the Alabama Secretary of State.
- If you place an order with us, the form will be available instantly. We’ll even pay and file the change of agent filing for you.
- It’s a simple change, but for more info, see our guide on how to change your registered agent in Alabama.
Why Northwest Is the Best Registered Agent in Alabama
Our registered agent service for your Alabama business includes the tools you need to keep your business running without a hitch. When you hire Northwest as your registered agent, you get:
- Same-Day scans: We scan your legal docs the same day we receive them and reach out if your essential mail goes unread.
- Privacy by Default®: We list our business address on public docs to keep your personal info safe. And unlike those other guys, we never sell your data.
- Corporate Guides®: Have questions? We have answers. Our guides are business experts whose sole job is to provide support for all your business questions.
As the nation’s top choice for starting businesses easily and affordably, we also offer in-house services to build your business’s online identity:
- Domain name: Pick a domain name for your business with your choice of extension (like .com and .net).
- Website: We provide a pre-built business website for you to customize using an open source platform, so it’s yours to own whether hosted by us or anyone you choose.
- Business email address: Create up to 10 business email addresses. For branding ease, they’ll all end in your chosen domain name.
- Phone number: Keep your personal line private by establishing a business phone number for client communications.
- Web hosting: Our web hosting service includes SSL security at no additional cost.
How to Order Alabama Registered Agent Service
You sign up online at the top right corner of this page.
We collect the first year of the registered agent service fee up front.
We’ll become your registered agent after you make your business registration filing with the Alabama Secretary of State.
About a year later, we’ll send you an invoice for another year of registered agent service in Alabama. If you want to keep using us, great; if you don’t, you can easily cancel.
We make it easy to add registered agent services in other states. We attempt to make your account a real go-to resource for you, not just for registered agent service or paying a bill, but for actually keeping up with Alabama corporate paperwork formalities.
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AL Registered Agent FAQs
- State law requires all legitimate, registered businesses to appoint an agent.
- The Secretary of State will reject your business filing if you don’t appoint a registered agent.
- A registered agent requirement gives the public and the state a reliable way to contact your business.
We provide a commercial registered office location in Dothan, AL.
Absolutely! We’re the only national registered agent service that allows our clients to list our addresses for everything when you’re doing a filing to keep your private addresses out of public records.
We don’t want ALL of your business mail. It’s not what we do. And it wouldn’t serve you well. You wouldn’t have a unique address or suite number. Any mail we receive on your behalf would come to Northwest Registered Agent, care of you.
But we understand that businesses and clients sometimes reach out to you through your registered agent. Through us. That’s why we give you five FREE scans of regular business mail a year. You can request any additional documents to be forwarded at a per document rate of $15.
You should hire us first and then do your business registration filing, because you can’t form an LLC or corporation in the Yellowhammer State without a registered agent. You’ll find all the Alabama forms and instructions you need to complete your filing instantly after you place an order.
Service on your registered agent is legal proof that you were notified of a lawsuit.
Regardless of whether you actually receive the documents your Alabama-based registered agent signs for, you’ve been legally notified once the agent accepts them. This is a serious responsibility that we do not take lightly. This is how it works:
- A process server, the county sheriff, or any third party will walk into our office and hand us the documents (service of process), which we sign for.
- The process server then gives an affidavit (a receipt of service) to the court as confirmation that they served us.
Note: If you’ve hired Northwest, you’ve received your documents long before the process server hands in their affidavit to the court—because we scanned them to your online account within minutes of having been served.
- You can do an Alabama business name search on the state’s website.
- Type in the company name you are trying to look up.
- Look at the registered agent name and registered office street address.
If you want to legally notify someone through their Alabama registered agent service, just send a certified letter directly to the registered agent name and registered office address.