California Foreign Corporation Registration

California Foreign Corporation

Not sure if your business is considered a foreign corporation doing business in California? We’re here to help!

If you are a corporation based in a state other than California and want to start doing business in California, you will need a certificate of authority to legally operate in California. You can obtain the state-issued certificate of authority by filing as a foreign corporation with the California Secretary of State, Corporations Division. After you submit your forms, the State of California will return a filed certificate of authority to you. A California foreign corporation is not to be confused with an out-of-country corporation. Any corporation not actually formed (created) in California is called a “foreign corporation doing business in California.”

We only charge $100 plus the California State filing fee to prepare and submit the foreign California corporation Certificate of Authority form to the California Secretary of State, Corporations Division. We will also track down the paperwork needed from the home state of your incorporation to submit your paperwork.

If you want to do the filing yourself: you just need to sign up for our registered agent service in California and the foreign corporation form is already in your client account immediately. As an added bonus, we’ve included some filing tips on how to make the filing with the state. You are required to have an California registered agent anyway, so we try to make this a simple process for you, whether you want us to submit your papers or you want to send them to the California Secretary of State yourself.

How Do I Get Started?

You sign up for our registered agent service first. Next, you can look at the foreign corporation form in your online account and also at the included filing tips. If you don’t want to fill out and submit the documents yourself, you just click the “Add services” tab in your account, and add our filing services for $100 plus the currently-non-existent state filing fees. Your account shows real time status of our work in progress. Once we are finished with your foreign corporation registration in California, we always upload the filing to your online account, email it to you, and mail you the original filed documents.

Have an out of state LLC doing business in California? We can help with that too!