What is the US equivalent of Companies House?

There is no single one. US incorporation happens state by state, each with its own registry, and no unified free national register exists. What that means in practice, and why the UK register is unusually open.

Short answer: there is not one. The United States has no single national company register, and that absence is the whole answer to this question. Here is how the American system actually works, what the nearest equivalents are, and why the UK register you are probably used to is unusual by world standards.

Incorporation is a state matter

American companies are formed under state law, not federal law. Each of the fifty states runs its own registry, usually under the Secretary of State's office, and a company incorporates in exactly one of them regardless of where it actually operates. Delaware is the famous example: a large share of big American corporations are legally Delaware entities for reasons of corporate law and courts, whatever their headquarters address says. So the closest literal equivalent of Companies House is fifty separate offices with fifty separate websites, fifty search tools and fifty ideas about what is public and what costs money.

What each state shows you varies wildly

Some state registries are genuinely useful: free search, officer names, filing documents. Others show little more than the company's name, status and registered agent, and charge for anything further. There is no national search that queries all fifty at once, no standard data format across them, and no equivalent of the UK's single free bulk download of every company. Commercial data vendors exist precisely to stitch that patchwork together, which is why US company data is an industry in itself.

SEC EDGAR covers public companies only

The nearest thing to a famous national database, EDGAR, belongs to the Securities and Exchange Commission and covers companies that issue securities to the public: their accounts, prospectuses and ongoing disclosures. It is excellent for the few thousand listed companies and useless for the millions of private ones, which file nothing with the SEC at all. A private American company can operate for decades leaving almost no public paper trail beyond its state registration.

What the UK does differently

Companies House is a single national register covering every limited company in the country, searchable for free, with directors, filing history, accounts and ownership (the PSC register) public by default, plus SIC industry codes on every record and free bulk data for anyone who wants the whole register. That combination, one register, free, complete, machine-readable, is genuinely rare, and it is the reason a UK-only lead generation model built on the public record can exist at all: the raw material is public in a way American equivalents simply are not.

The practical takeaways

• If you are researching a US company, start with the Secretary of State site for its state of incorporation, then EDGAR if it is public.
• If you are used to Companies House and expecting the same depth for American firms, adjust expectations: officer detail, accounts and ownership are often simply not public.
• If you are prospecting, the asymmetry matters: UK targeting can lean on official register data for industry, age, location and filing signals; US targeting always involves commercial databases because no public source carries that detail.

For how the UK register itself is structured and what every field means, our guide to the public record is the ten-minute version.