12.4 Million US Business Records Available Free via Five State Open-Data Portals

Five US states — New York, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Oregon, and Connecticut — publicly host their full business registries on Socrata open-data portals, covering approximately 12.4 million entities with commercial use explicitly permitted. The datasets include details such as entity names, types, formation dates, addresses, and registered agents, accessible through documented SODA API endpoints. New York's dataset is the largest at 4.22 million active corporations, with records dating back to 1800, while a companion filing-history dataset adds another 20.6 million rows. A developer team built a Python fetcher to pull and normalize the data across all five states, mapping inconsistent column names into a unified schema with pagination and resume support. The project highlights a lesser-known alternative to paid services like OpenCorporates, though notable gaps remain — Delaware, home to a disproportionate share of US incorporations, offers no bulk access or public API.