Pennsylvania Registered Agent

• All businesses registered with the state must designate a registered office in their formation documents.
• The Pennsylvania Department of State will reject your filing if you do not appoint one.
• The state and the general public must have a reliable way to contact your Pennsylvania business with legal notices and other types of official mail.

Note: Pennsylvania’s statute requires businesses to designate a registered office instead of a registered agent, so you have to designate a place for service of process to be delivered and not a person or entity who will sign for it.

To further confuse the point, PA registered agents are referred to as Commercial Registered Office Providers (CROPs). This requirement makes for odd wording, but is essentially the same as other states’ registered agent requirements. A commercial registered office provider in Pennsylvania is the same thing as a registered agent elsewhere. They’re just different terms.

Yes, you can be your own registered agent in Pennsylvania. 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 Pennsylvania 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 5 days a week.

Definitely! 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.

We understand that businesses and clients sometimes reach out to you through your registered agent. That’s why we give you five FREE scans of regular (non-state and non-legal) business mail a year. You can request any additional documents to be forwarded at a per document rate of $15.

Service on your registered agent is legal proof that you were notified. Regardless of whether you actually receive the documents your Pennsylvania registered agent office provider signs for, once they accept the documents, you’ve been notified. 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.

To find a company’s registered agent:

1. You can do a PA business name search.
2. Type in the name of the company you’re searching for.

In the results, you’ll find the registered agent’s name and registered office street address.

If you want to legally notify a business through their registered agent, send a letter through certified mail and address it to the registered agent name and registered office address.

A Pennsylvania Commercial Registered Office (CROP) is a company that provides an official PA street address for your business to list on filings and DOS records. It is required by law to obtain a Pennsylvania CROP if your business does not have a physical location in the state, but it’s also a great way to keep your personal info OFF public records wherever your business is located.

*Northwest Registered Agent is officially recognized as a CROP provider by the PA Department of State.

In Pennsylvania, to resign as a registered agent, you need to submit a Statement of Change of Registered Office by Agent to the Pennsylvania Department of State. For a more detailed walkthrough, you can refer to our guide on how to resign as a registered agent in Pennsylvania.