Change events

Company change events from state registries

A company change event is a record that something about a registered business changed: it was formed, renamed, dissolved, moved, or filed a new registered agent or officer. Recordwire reads the official bulk files each Secretary of State publishes, diffs every record against the previous file, and turns the differences into an append-only feed you can poll by date over REST or query from an agent over MCP.

The six event types

Every event carries id, type, entity_id, effective_at (when the state says it happened), observed_at (the date of the file we read it in), and a payload shaped by type.

business.created: { legalName, entityType, status, formationDate, formationJurisdiction } — effective_at is the state's formation date, so formation queries work back to the first file.
business.name_changed: { from, to } — the previous and current legal name, or a name change the state published itself.
business.status_changed: { from: { status, statusReason }, to: { status, statusReason } } — normalized status plus the state's own wording, such as “Delinquent” or “Voluntarily Dissolved”.
business.address_changed: { field: "principalAddress" | "mailingAddress", from, to } — full address objects on both sides.
business.agent_changed: { from, to } — registered agent objects, { name, address }.
business.officers_changed: { added: [{ name, title }], removed: [{ name, title }] } — titles verbatim per state. Officer names are in the API, never on these public pages.

A worked example

A Florida LLC that dissolved on 4 September, in the file we read the next morning:

business.status_changed

{
  "id": 48213907,
  "type": "business.status_changed",
  "entity_id": "US-FL:L21000318842",
  "effective_at": "2026-09-04",
  "observed_at": "2026-09-05",
  "payload": {
    "from": { "status": "active", "statusReason": "Active" },
    "to": { "status": "inactive", "statusReason": "Voluntarily Dissolved" }
  }
}

How far back the history goes

Depth is set by the state, not by us. Where a state publishes its own dated filing history we load it; everywhere else the history starts at our first file for that state and grows forward.

History depth by state
State	Cadence	Officers	History
Florida	Daily + quarterly snapshot	Yes, incl. LLC managers	Quarterly event file
New York	Daily	Chairman only	From first observation
Colorado	Daily	Not published	From first observation
Pennsylvania	Weekly	Yes	From first observation
Virginia	Weekly	Corporations only	State-published amendments, back decades
Connecticut	Nightly	Yes	Name changes
Oregon	Daily	Authorized reps	From first observation

Virginia publishes an amendment file carrying name changes back decades. Florida publishes a quarterly event file. Connecticut publishes a name-history dataset. New York, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Oregon publish current-state files only, so their history begins the day we started reading them.

Questions

How do I get notified when a company's registered agent changes?

Poll GET /v1/events?type=business.agent_changed&observed_since=YYYY-MM-DD with the date of your last successful poll. Sorting by observed_at means you get everything we learned since then, including changes the state backdated. To watch a specific portfolio, call GET /v1/businesses/{id}/events per company, or filter the feed by jurisdiction and match IDs on your side.

How is a change feed different from a company lookup API?

A lookup API answers “what does this company look like right now”. A change feed answers “what changed since I last asked”. You never re-fetch millions of records to find the handful that moved: one dated query returns only the deltas, each with the before and after values and the state's own reason attached.

How far back does the change history go?

As far back as the state publishes. Virginia's amendment history reaches back decades, Florida ships a quarterly event file, and Connecticut publishes name changes. New York, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Oregon publish only a current snapshot, so their change history starts from our first observation and deepens every day. Formation dates are complete everywhere, because business.created is dated to the state's own formation date.

How quickly do changes appear?

As fast as the state publishes, plus one ingest run. Florida, New York, Colorado, Oregon, and Connecticut publish daily or nightly, so changes are usually queryable within a day of the state posting the file. Virginia's bulk file and Pennsylvania's open-data extract are weekly, so those two states move on a weekly cadence. Every state's last file date is on its coverage page.

Full parameters and payloads are in the docs. To query the same feed from an agent, see the MCP server.