How to Live Privately With an LLC: Name Privacy and Address Privacy Are Two Different Jobs

Two jobs, two levers

Everything else in this article hangs off one table, so here it is up front.

The rest of this article walks each column, then the surfaces beyond state filings where both jobs show up again.

Name privacy: the state decides, and only three never ask who owns it

Anonymous LLC lists usually name four states: Delaware, Nevada, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Only three deliver. Our article on whether LLC ownership becomes public record walks Delaware and Wyoming statute by statute: Delaware's formation statute asks for no owner and the state has no LLC annual report at all, only a flat annual tax, while Wyoming's annual report asks for a principal office address and a certification, not a member roster. New Mexico we read for this article: it never asks on the way in, and has no recurring LLC filing that could ask later.

Nevada is the one that does not belong on the list. NRS 86.263 requires an annual list naming each manager or, if there is none, each managing member, with an address for each. The address can be a business one; the name is not optional. The same section attaches a penalty to filing a nominee manager with fraudulent intent to conceal who actually controls the company, in furtherance of unlawful conduct. Nevada did not forget to offer anonymity. It declined.

One jurisdiction runs the other way: the District of Columbia collects owner names at formation, under a chapter that sits outside the LLC act, and republishes them as a downloadable dataset. The full six-jurisdiction walk-through is in the ownership article, and the bigger where-to-form question is covered in our state-by-state comparison and the State Checker.

Address privacy: you decide, on every filing you submit

Address privacy has no lucky states, because it is not the state's decision. Formation documents, statements of information, annual reports, and agent designations all carry address fields, and the state prints whatever you put in them. Many founders working from home put their home address in every field, which is how a home address ends up indexed by search engines and mirrored by data sites. What becomes public, field by field, is the subject of our home-address article.

A registered agent is the tool many people buy for this, and it covers exactly one field: the agent for service of process. That is what the agent's address is for. The other address fields on the filing show whatever you filed in them. Some agents offer their address for broader use and some do not, which is a vendor policy question; the filing itself does not care who provided an address, only what the fields say.

The general fix is boring, which is the good news. Put a commercial business address in the address fields, starting with the next filing you submit. A save office address is a real commercial street address that can occupy the business address lines on state filings, and the address checker reports what USPS says about any address, ours included, before you commit it to a form.

The leak surface past the state registry

State filings are the loudest source, but the same two jobs repeat across every system that touches your company.

• Banks. This is where named humans enter a file by federal rule: the customer due diligence rule, 31 CFR 1010.230, has the bank identify each 25 percent owner and one control person. The federal text describes an individual's address as a residential or business street address, so the rule allows either; many banks ask for your home address specifically and check it against your ID, and that is the bank's own policy layered on the federal floor. Bank files are not public records, but they are one more place your details live.
• Domains. Registration data went in the opposite direction from state registries: under ICANN's Registration Data Policy, effective August 21, 2025, public lookups redact registrant personal data, and registrar privacy services list a proxy address in the record. Our domain privacy article covers the details.
• Your own website and invoices. No statute publishes these; you do. A contact page, an invoice footer, and a marketplace profile each repeat whatever address you decided to type. Decide once, and make it the commercial one.
• Real estate. The deed that transfers a house is recorded with the county, and whatever name takes title is the name in that record. If an LLC takes title, a county search returns the LLC's name. The trade-offs of holding a home that way are their own subject, covered in our real estate article.
• Registry mirror sites. Sites like OpenCorporates republish what the state register shows, and OpenCorporates' own policy is that it mirrors official registries and does not remove public-record data on request. For mirrors of that kind, the practical lever is the upstream state record: change what the register shows, and the mirror follows on its own schedule.

Already public? What walks back, and what does not

If your home address is already on filed documents, be precise about what an amendment does. In California, the statute itself says a newly filed Statement of Information supersedes the earlier one. Supersede is a rule about which statement is current. It is not an eraser: California's Secretary of State provides free online access to its imaged filings, over 17 million of them, and prior filings stay in that archive. What is visible varies by state; Delaware's free search, for instance, surfaces the registered agent information rather than document images. Our home-address article walks through what undoing an exposure costs, state by state.

So treat a state registry as an archive you append to, not a profile you edit. The realistic goal is forward-facing: the current record, the one that mirror sites and verification services read first, shows a commercial address, and every filing from here on does too. Mirrors follow the upstream record on their own schedule, and prior values can remain visible as history.