The Secretary of State keeps the list of every company allowed to do business here. This is that list, read end to end: how big it actually is, where the businesses sit, who registers from outside the state, and the places where the register cannot answer a basic question about its own entries.
How many businesses Indiana actually has, and why three different numbers all get quoted.
Depending on what you count, Indiana has 854,000 businesses, 687,000, or 569,000. All three are defensible and they mean different things, so here is the whole path from the state's records to the map below.
The honest headline is 687,488 businesses. The larger figure counts filings rather than companies: one business with a trade name and a former name files three records. The smaller one is what can be put on an Indiana map, which excludes the companies registered here that keep their office in another state — they are still real, and they appear further down.
Indiana-addressed businesses by ZIP, the states the rest file from, and what county counts look like once population is accounted for.
Every Indiana-addressed business, placed by the ZIP of its principal office. Click a category to filter; the circles resize to that category alone.
Circles are coloured by the most common category in that ZIP. Businesses whose names do not say what they do carry no colour but are still counted — see What the register cannot tell you below.
| State | Businesses | Share |
|---|
| Type | Count | Share |
|---|
| County | Businesses | Per 1,000 |
|---|
| Category | Businesses | Share |
|---|
The register read as an economy, and every trade it can be searched for.
Grouping the categories into kinds of work shows what Indiana's business list is actually made of — and where the register stops being able to see.
| Kind of work | Businesses | Share of classified |
|---|
| County |
|---|
Each row is that county's own register, as percentages. Read down the knowledge column: it is the clearest difference between Indiana's affluent suburbs and its older industrial cities, and unlike raw density it is a statement about the kind of business being formed rather than the number.
Every trade the register can be read for, with counts. Type to filter.
| Trade | Group | Businesses | Source |
|---|
Three limits worth stating. These undercount: a daycare called "Little Sprouts LLC" matches nothing. A few overcount: a blood bank is not a bank, though both are now separated. And the register counts companies, not locations — Kroger's roughly 100 Indiana stores are four filings, so no store count exists here at any level. Rows marked state were classified by the office itself at filing; the rest are read from the business name.
The gaps are the findings. Half the businesses have names that say nothing, a fifth of this year’s filings have no address at all, and ten agents are the legal address for a sixth of the register.
A business name is the only description most filings carry. That works when a company is called Hoosier Roofing. It does not work at all for the rest, and the split is not close.
| How the business is named | Businesses | Share |
|---|
Only the first group can be classified from the register alone. Address-named filings — "1125 Hamilton Street, LLC" — are nearly always single-property holding vehicles. Person-named filings are usually one person and an LLC. Opaque names like "100P LLC" or "4RC LLC" describe nothing; no dictionary reaches them, and only reading the company's own website would say what it does.
| Month | Filed | No street address | Share |
|---|
| Decade | Registered | LLC | Corporation |
|---|
A complete inversion in forty years. Counts are businesses from that decade still active today, so older decades are thinned by dissolution — but the LLC-versus-corporation mix within each decade is unaffected by that, and it is the mix that moved.
Each of these was typed into a state filing form and accepted. None are scraping errors; they are what the register contains.
These are the entries that resist being mapped or contacted. The largest group is addresses that cannot be resolved to any real place — which means the register holds an active business with no usable location on file.
| Registered agent | Businesses | Share |
|---|
A registered agent is the legal point of contact for service of process. Commercial agents are ordinary and lawful; the point here is concentration — a notice problem at one of these firms is a notice problem for tens of thousands of Indiana businesses at once.
Every number above comes from the state's own filings. Where a figure rests on something less certain, it says so here rather than in a footnote.
Nothing in this report is excluded or discarded. The three headline counts are three different questions — how many filings, how many companies, how many can be placed on an Indiana map — and all three appear at the top with the path between them. A business whose address will not resolve is still counted as a business; it simply cannot be drawn.