IN.gov

New businesses drive Indiana's economy. With that in mind, Secretary of State Connie Lawson is dedicated to making your business registration experience even easier with the INBiz portal.

Step 1

Selecting a business name is one of the first steps of starting a business.

Indiana law requires that the name of a Corporation, L.L.C., L.P., and an L.L.P. is distinguishable from the name of any other business of the same type on record with the Secretary of State's office. To determine if a particular name is available, conduct a name availability check.

The Check Name Availability search helps the user determine if a business entity's legal name may be available for use. It is only a preliminary search, meaning the name cannot be guaranteed as available until the final processing is completed at the time of filing. You should not rely, in any way, upon this preliminary information. If the name is available, you may either file an application to reserve the name for 120 days or file documents to organize the business under that name.

  • Check Name Availability Search Tips

    When performing searches, use the partial word search function. This will return a greater number of variations and will allow you to compare your proposed name to names that are already in our database.

    Use only the singular forms of your proposed name when performing your search. This would have the effect of returning plurals if the partial word search is used. This effect is desired because singulars are indistinguishable from plurals and possessives for the Indiana Secretary of State's registration purposes.

    When you are searching for information on a company that has "and" or "&" as a part of its name, you may need to perform your search using both cases in order to produce satisfactory results.

  • Name Availability Guidelines

    A name is distinguishable if:

    • It contains different letters, numerals or words.
    • It has a different sequence of letters or numerals from other names in the Secretary of State's records.
    • The roots of the words are the same but the words are in a different order.

    The following are not distinguishing characteristics:

    • Differences in business identifiers such as "Inc.", "corporation", "LLC", or "LLP".
    • The use of articles such as "the," "an" or "a"
    • Differences in punctuation
    • Differences in capitalization
    • Plurals or possessives
    • Hyphenation or combined words
    • The words "and" and "&" are interchangeable on the records of the Secretary of State.
    • Arabic, Roman and spelled-out numbers are treated the same.

Ready to get started?

Step Two