Tennessee Registered Agent

You should hire us first and then form your Tennessee LLC or corporation because the Secretary of State will reject your business registration filing if you don’t list your registered agent. You’ll find all the forms and instructions you need to complete your filing instantly after you place an order.

Yes, you can be your own registered agent in Tennessee. 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 Tennessee 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.

We accept and scan all of our Tennessee clients’ documents on-site at our registered office in Knoxville, TN.

Absolutely! As part of our registered agent service, we’ll not only send you a reminder, but we’ll make sure you have access to all the forms and instructions you need to stay compliant.

In Tennessee, the Secretary of State sends annual reports to the mailing address you specify. Domestic Tennessee corporations cost $20 if there are no changes and $40 if there are. All other entities cost $300 if there are no changes and $320 if there are. Reports are due April 1st, or the first day of the 4th month after your fiscal year ends. Annual reports for Tennessee LLCs get mailed out at the end of December or beginning of January.

Yes! We don’t mind if you put our address on your filing with the Secretary of State. We’re the only national registered agent service that allows clients to use the registered office address and keep your own address off the public record.

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 unique address or suite number. Any mail we receive on your behalf would come to to Northwest Registered Agent, care of you.

But we understand that businesses and clients sometimes reach out to you through your registered agent, which would be us. That’s why we give you 5 FREE scans of regular business mail a year. You can request any additional documents to be forwarded at a per document rate of $15.

Serving a registered agent is legal proof of notification. Whether you receive the documents your Tennessee registered agent signs for or not, once they accept the documents, you’ve legally been notified. This is a serious responsibility and we don’t take it lightly. Here’s how it works:

• A process server, the county sheriff, or any third party will walk into our Tennessee office and hands us the documents, which we then sign for. This is called service of process.
• The process server then gives an affidavit (a receipt of service) to the court which states that they “served” us.
• If you’ve hired us, long before the server hands in their affidavit to the court, you’ve received your documents because we scanned them to your online account within minutes of having been served

If you want to legally notify someone through their registered agent, just send a certified letter directly to the registered agent name and registered office address.

• You can do a Tennessee business name search on the state’s website
• Type in the company name you are trying to look up.
• Look at the TN registered agent name and registered office street address.

In Tennessee, to resign as a registered agent, you need to submit a Statement of Resignation of Registered Agent (and the $20 fee for processing) to the Tennessee Secretary of State. For a more detailed walkthrough, you can refer to our guide on how to resign as a registered agent in Tennessee.