Connecticut business entity search: free lookup and open API

Every endpoint on this page was live-probed on 2026-07-29 by the Aidenix Atlas catalog.

What is the Connecticut business entity search?

The Connecticut business entity search is the public lookup over the Secretary of the State's business register, and it carries one field group no other state register publishes: ownership-diversity flags on every record. In our data — the Aidenix Atlas catalog, endpoint live-probed on 2026-07-29 — the register holds 1,288,557 records of which 453,629 are active, and 104,064 are flagged as woman-owned. What the file gives you:

• Status, registration date, mailing address and account number for every entity.
• Four self-declared ownership flags — woman, minority, veteran and LGBTQI-owned.
• A keyless API at data.ct.gov returning all of it as JSON, no signup.

Key facts at a glance

A key-facts table is the 60-second version of this page. In our data: 1,288,557 records, 6 status values, 4 ownership flags, 0 API keys required. Every row from our own probe run of 2026-07-29, according to the Aidenix Atlas catalog logs:

How do you search Connecticut business entities?

A Connecticut entity search is one HTTP GET against the state's open-data API, filterable on any field including the ownership flags. According to our probe of 2026-07-29:

# name search, keyless
curl "https://data.ct.gov/resource/n7gp-d28j.json?\$where=upper(name)%20like%20'%25PRATT%20%26%20WHITNEY%25'&\$limit=3"

We ran that on 2026-07-29 and the register returned these records, unedited:

Three things in that output are worth reading before you build on this file. The names carry trailing articles — «THE» sits at the end rather than the start, a filing convention that breaks alphabetical sorting and exact matching alike. Registration dates run back to 1935, so the file is a century of Connecticut incorporations rather than a current snapshot. And a single brand resolves to several separate legal entities, which is normal and is exactly why an entity search answers «which legal entities carry this name» rather than «which company is this».

What are the Connecticut ownership flags?

An ownership flag is a boolean on the entity record declaring that the business is owned by a woman, a minority owner, a veteran or an LGBTQI owner, and Connecticut is the only state register in our catalog that publishes them as queryable fields. Counts from our probe run of 2026-07-29, across all 1,288,557 records:

This turns a routine register into a supplier-diversity dataset, and in our data it is the reason to reach for Connecticut over larger states when the question is about ownership rather than existence. Two cautions that matter more than the counts:

• The flags are self-declared at registration, not certified — they record what the filer stated, which is not the same as a formal diversity certification.
• They are not refreshed on a schedule, so an entity that changed hands may still carry an old declaration.

What this dataset cannot tell you

A state business register records existence and standing, not commerce, and in our data this file stops at 4 walls. Of the nearly 4,000 sources the Aidenix Atlas catalog tracks, Connecticut is unusual for its ownership flags and still cannot answer the following:

• No officers or directors. The file names the entity, not the people who run it.
• No financials. Revenue, headcount and assets are absent from every state register.
• No industry code. There is no SIC or NAICS field on the record.
• No entity type breakdown as clean codes. Business type is a text field, so grouping it requires normalisation first.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Connecticut business entity search free? Yes, on both routes. The Secretary of the State's web form handles single lookups, and the data.ct.gov API serves the same register as JSON with no key, no registration and no quota.

What does «forfeited» mean in Connecticut? It means the entity lost its authority to operate, usually for failing to file annual reports, without being formally dissolved. In our probe of 2026-07-29 forfeited entities numbered 357,830 — the second-largest group after active — so a name hit in this register is more often a lapsed entity than a live one.

Can I search Connecticut businesses by ownership type? Yes, and this is the file's distinctive capability. The four flags are boolean fields you can filter on directly, so a query for active woman-owned entities in a given town is one request with no key — a search that in most states requires a separate certification database, if one exists at all.

How we verify these claims

Our verification method is a live probe, not a citation chain — every count, sample and limitation on this page comes from requests we sent ourselves on 2026-07-29. What the probe run covers, in our data:

• Endpoint liveness: the API answered HTTP 200, out of the nearly 4,000 sources the Aidenix Atlas catalog tracks.
• Live samples: the Pratt & Whitney records, the status counts and the four flag counts are unedited API output.
• Field types checked, not assumed: the ownership flags were verified as booleans against the live schema after a text comparison failed.
• Freshness contract: when a source drifts, the probe fleet flags it and this page gets re-verified — the «last probed» date above is that promise.

Neighbouring registers with the same access model: New York and Colorado. The full free stack across states, SEC and international registers: our company data API guide.

Source facts from the Aidenix Atlas catalog, probed 2026-07-29. Found an error? The catalog re-probes on every report.