How to find out who owns a company in Texas

Why Texas is easier than most states

Plenty of states will only tell you the registered agent, which is usually a service company that has been instructed not to pass on messages. Texas is better than that. The certificate of formation for an LLC requires governing persons to be named, so in most cases a real human being appears on the public record from day one.

That’s not universal — some states publish nothing at all. We compared them in which states publish LLC member names.

Route one: the Comptroller, free

This is the route most people miss. The Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts maintains a Taxable Entity Search covering entities registered for franchise tax, and it displays registered agent and officer or director details at no charge.

1. Search the entity by legal name or taxpayer number.
2. Open the entity record.
3. Look for the officer and director listing, which names the people associated with the entity.

It won’t cover every entity — a brand-new company may not appear until it’s registered for franchise tax — but for an established business it’s free and it’s fast.

Route two: SOSDirect, paid

The Texas Secretary of State runs SOSDirect, which holds the authoritative record including the original certificate of formation. It’s the better source, particularly for recently formed entities, but it charges a fee per search and requires an account.

Use this when you need the filing itself, when the entity is too new to have surfaced at the Comptroller, or when you need the formation date on the record rather than an approximation.

What to do when only the agent is listed

Sometimes the only name on a Texas filing belongs to a commercial registered agent. That tells you the company was formed through a filing service, and it means the address on the record is the agent’s office rather than the business.

When that happens, your options are the assumed name (DBA) filing at county level, the franchise tax record once it exists, or the company’s own website and licensing records. What you should not do is call the registered agent and expect to be connected — that isn’t what they’re for. We wrote about telling these roles apart in registered agent, incorporator, officer.

If you need this at scale

Everything above works for one company. It stops working at ten a day.

If you’re trying to reach Texas businesses as they form rather than researching one at a time, that’s what we do — every new Texas entity with governing persons parsed off the certificate, delivered as a daily CSV or over an API by 8am, with agent-formed shells already removed. See Texas formation data or how it’s priced.