Does a Registered Agent Hide Your Home Address? We Counted 42,519 Filings

What we counted, and how

The source is the Florida Division of Corporations' public data downloads, the same daily files anyone can pull from the state's documented server. We took every domestic LLC record with a July 2026 file date from July's daily files and removed duplicates by document number, which leaves 42,519 companies. Filings processed after July 31 are not in the sample, so the true July total is slightly higher.

For each company we compared the principal address to the registered agent's address after normalizing abbreviations, so 4th Street North and 4TH ST N count as the same address. Where normalization fails, the comparison undercounts matches, which means every match rate in this article is a floor, not a ceiling, and the non-match rates, the 64.4 percent included, are ceilings. To decide whether an agent is a professional service, we matched agent names against national registered agent and formation services plus obvious service patterns. Corporate agents we could not classify stay in a separate bucket, so 19.5 percent is a floor too.

Most new LLCs have no professional agent at all

Before the question of whether a paid agent hides anything, the data answers a quieter one: most filings bring no professional agent service into the picture. 72.5 percent of July's LLCs named a person as their registered agent. Another 8 percent named a company we could not match to a known service, a group that includes law firms and one-off corporate agents. That leaves 19.5 percent, about one filing in five, that hired a recognizable professional agent.

The individual agents mostly sit at the company's own address: in 61.2 percent of all 42,519 filings, the agent is a person and the address listed for that person is the company's principal address, which is consistent with owners serving as their own agent. The same pattern holds one field over. 88.4 percent of filings name at least one owner or manager personally, and in 61.8 percent of filings the address on that person's line is the company's principal address. A first and last name, next to an address, in a public record that the state distributes in bulk.

Hiring an agent usually did not move the company's address off the filing

Now the 8,283 filings that did hire a professional agent. If the privacy promise worked the way buyers read it, the agent's address would stand in for the company's across the filing. In 35.6 percent of these filings it does: the principal address is the agent's address. In the other 64.4 percent, the filing carries a separate address of the company's own.

The split is not random noise. The two services at the top are standalone registered agent companies, and one of them, Northwest, openly markets letting customers use its street address on business filings beyond the agent line. Northwest's customers' filings show exactly that, the agent's address reused as the principal address in roughly seven of ten cases, and Registered Agents Inc's filings show the same reuse pattern.

The zeros deserve a careful reading. In the 2,714 filings naming Inc Authority, ZenBusiness, LegalZoom, or Republic Registered Agent as agent, the principal address matched the agent's address zero times. That is not the agent failing at its job. The agent line on those filings is filled in correctly, and service of process works. It means the rest of the filing shows whatever the customer typed into it, and the customers typed addresses of their own.

One field is not the filing

The mechanics are visible in the state's own file layout. A Florida LLC record carries a principal address, a mailing address, the registered agent's name and address, and up to six officer or member lines, each with its own address field. The registered agent covers exactly one of those. We walk through the difference between the agent field and the business address in a separate article; the short version is that they are different fields answering different legal questions.

Even the pages selling the privacy framing acknowledge this once you reach their FAQ. The first guide quoted above, the one selling the promise, concedes that "your home address can still appear in other state or licensing records if you list it as your principal office address." That sentence, multiplied across a month of real filings, is the 64.4 percent.

There is also a half of LLC privacy that no address service touches: whether your name appears on the filing is set by the state's statutes, not by what you file in the address fields. Florida names owners or managers on most filings, as the 88.4 percent above shows. Our guide to living privately with an LLC maps that split in full.

If you have not filed yet

The cheapest version of this problem is the one you solve before filing. The lever is not which agent you hire. It is what you decide to type into every address field: principal, mailing, and the owner lines, not just the agent line.

• Decide the address for every field before you file, not after. The filing will show what you typed, in each field, independently.
• A commercial business address you have the right to use can go in the principal, mailing, and owner address fields on a Florida filing. At least one state, Oregon, defines its principal office field more narrowly, so check the definition in your state before you file.
• If you want to check an address before it goes on a filing, run it through our address checker first. It reads the USPS record for the address and tells you how it is classified.
• If you already filed your home address, the fix is forward-looking: your next amendment or annual report replaces what the current record shows, while copies of past filings remain. Our home address article walks the undo, state by state, with costs.

For the sake of the same honesty this article asks of agent marketing: save office sells commercial business addresses, not registered agent service, and an address does not remove your name from a state filing. It changes which address the public record shows. In a month where 26,271 filings put an owner's name next to the company address, that is the field worth deciding deliberately.