New York Registered Agent
New York's Secretary of State acts as your default NY Registered Agent, which means technically you don't need a registered agent in NY. But every New York LLC must publish legal notice in two local, approved newspapers for six weeks. New York’s publication requirement can cost big bucks depending where your LLC is located. Our office is in Albany, which has low cost publishing fees. You can save hundreds, if not thousands of dollars just by hiring us. Get more with Northwest. Northwest is the only registered agent that can provide your business services from domains to DBAs easily, and all in-house.
Get Registered Agent Service
When You Want More
Our registered agent service gives you access to:
- Virtual Office Address
- NY LLC Publication Help
- 1 Year Free Domain Use
- 90 Day Free Website Hosting
- 90 Day Free Business Email Account
- 90 Day Free Business Phone Number
What Is a NY Registered Agent?
A registered agent is a person or company that you designate to receive legal mail (like service of process) 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, New York’s state statutes (Article 3: Section 302 for LLCs and Section 305 for corporations), registered agents are legally required in New York. 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 Registered Agents in NY?
Whether your business is a limited liability company (LLC) or corporation, the state of New York requires the same from a registered agent:
- A NY registered agent must be a state resident or an LLC or corporation that provides registered agent services.
- New York registered agents must maintain a registered office (a physical address in New York).
- NY registered agents must accept legal documents (service of process) during regular business hours.
How Do I Change My Registered Agent?
There are two ways to change your registered agent in New York.
- Hire us and we’ll complete the change of agent form for you for free.
- Do it yourself and file a Certificate of Change form with the New York Department of State.
Why Northwest Is the Best Registered Agent in New York
Our New York Registered Agent Service 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.
- Mail forwarding: We accept and scan all your state and legal mail, and will scan up to five personal documents for free. For $20 a month, we offer unlimited New York Mail Forwarding.
- 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 Northwest NY Registered Agent Service
You sign up online, clicking on one of the buttons or links that says HIRE US.
We collect the first year of the registered agent service fee up front.
For new businesses, we’ll become your registered agent once your business registration filing with the New York Secretary of State is complete.
About a year later, we’ll send you an invoice for another year of registered agent service. If you want to keep using us, great; if you don’t, you can easily cancel.
With offices in every state, we make it easy to add registered agent services anywhere in the country. We don’t farm out work (or your info) to other companies—wherever you are, WE are your registered agent.
We make your account a real go-to resource for you, not just for registered agent service or paying a bill but for keeping up with New York corporate compliance.
Worry-Free Service
in Minutes
Get Started
New York Registered Agent FAQs
- The state requires all registered businesses to appoint one.
- The registered agent requirement exists so the general public and the NY corporations division have a reliable way to contact your business.
Important note: New Yorkers love us because we save them thousands in publication costs every day. That’s because there’s a New York LLC publication requirement. When you form an LLC in New York, you must publish a summary of their Articles of Organization in two newspapers in the county of their principal office address. When New York clients hire us, they can use our Albany location as their principal address so they can publish in the Albany newspapers, which are much cheaper than New York City newspapers. Clients can later change their principal address by filing an amendment or certificate of change and spend far less than they would have paid for publishing in any NYC newspaper.
Yes, you can be your own registered agent in New York. However, after considering the registered agent requirements most business owners elect to hire a registered agent service instead. Why? Well although being your own registered agent will cost you $0, a New York registered agent’s name and address becomes part of the public record. Additionally, the registered agent is required to be available to accept service of process during normal business hours five days a week.
We accept and scan all of our New York clients’ documents on-site at our registered office in Albany, NY in Albany County.
Absolutely! If you own an LLC or corporation in New York, you’ll need to file your biennial statement every two years during your business’s anniversary month. As part of our Registered Agent Service, we’ll not only send you a reminder, but we’ll give you the form you need to file and instructions on how to file it.
Please do! We love our New York City clients, and if we can help you save money, we want to. We’re the only national registered agent service that allows our clients to list our address for everything when you’re doing a filing to keep your private address off public records. If you use our Albany address, you can meet the NY LLC publishing requirement and publish in Albany newspapers instead of an expensive one in NYC.
While you can use our address, we are not a return depot for online or Amazon sellers, though we’d love to accept your foosball tables. 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.
The NYS Division of Corporations will reject your business registration filing if you don’t designate a registered agent. As we mentioned, you may designate the Secretary of State as your agent for service of process, but there are so many benefits to choosing Northwest! You’ll have a reliable registered agent, you can publish in Albany, and you’ll find all the forms and instructions you need to complete your filing instantly after you place an order.
Serving a registered agent is legal proof that you were notified. Regardless of whether you receive the documents your New York registered agent signs for on your business’s behalf, once they accept the documents, you’ve been notified. You need a New York registered agent you can trust. Here is what happens when we are served with a lawsuit in NY:
- A process server, sheriff, or third party will walk into our Albany office and hand us the documents (service of process), which we sign for.
- We scan the document to your online account, immediately triggering our notification system.
- The process server then gives an affidavit (a receipt of service) to the court as confirmation that they served us.
- Perform a New York business name search with the Department of State, Division of Corporations.
- Type in the name of the company you’re searching for.
- Find the registered agent’s name and registered office street address in the search results.
If you want to legally notify a business through their New York registered agent service, just send a certified letter directly to the registered agent at their registered office address.
In New York, to resign as a registered agent, you need to submit a Certificate of Resignation of Registered Agent to the New York Department of State. For a more detailed walkthrough, you can refer to our guide on how to resign as a registered agent in New York.