How to verify a business address

To verify a business address, establish three things. First, that the address exists and is written correctly, which postal data such as the USPS ZIP Code lookup or Royal Mail's postcode finder can confirm. Second, what kind of place it is: premises the business occupies, a home, a coworking space or virtual office, a mailbox at a mail-receiving store, a registered agent's office, or an empty plot or building site. Third, whether the business actually operates there and whether the address fits its story, which comes from dated street imagery, a search of who else uses the address, the registry's address history, property records and the business's own footprint.

This piece explains the addresses a registry holds, takes each check in the order an onboarding, KYB or accounts payable team can run it, and ends with a worked example. Our guide to shell company red flags covers registered addresses shared by hundreds of companies, and our KYB guide covers the rest of a business check.

An address on an application, an invoice or a website is something the business has told you. Verifying it means answering three questions, each needing different evidence.

1. Does the address exist, and is it written correctly? Postal data answers this.
2. What kind of place is it? Imagery, property records and a search of the address answer this.
3. Does this business operate there, and does the address fit its story? Its own records and footprint, and other people's dealings with it, answer this.

A registry record does not settle any of the three on its own, because the business supplies its own addresses. Companies House's service information says that the fact information "has been placed on the public record should not be taken to indicate that Companies House has verified or validated it in any way". A registry tells you what the business said, and when.

A business can have several addresses on the record, and they mean different things.

The registered office, or in the US the registered agent's address, is an address the register publishes for the company. In the US the agent receives legal papers: the instructions to California's Statement of Information for an LLC say that the agent for service of process accepts legal documents on behalf of the LLC. In the UK, the government's guidance on setting up a company says the registered office address "will be publicly available on the online register".

The principal office is where the business says it is run from. The same California form asks for the "Street Address of Principal Office", with the instruction "Do not list a P.O. Box", then a separate mailing address that "may be a P.O. Box address or 'in care of' an individual or entity", and then the agent.

What a free registry search shows varies. Delaware's entity search gives, free of charge, "the entity name, file number, incorporation/formation date, registered agent name, address, phone number and residency". So the only address the free search shows for a Delaware company is its agent's.

A trading address, such as a shop or a warehouse, may appear nowhere on the register, and you find it on the business's website, invoices and packaging instead. So first work out which address you have been given. A registered office tells you where the paperwork goes, and most of the checks below are about the address the business says it operates from.

Run it through official postal data, which shows whether the address is in the postal record and gives you the standard form you need for every later search.

In the US, the USPS ZIP Code lookup takes a street address, a suite and a city and returns the standardised address with its full ZIP+4. Each result also shows detail fields, including a Commercial Mail Receiving Agency field, fields for a PMB designator and number, and a DPV confirmation indicator. USPS's address API documentation explains the indicator:

• Y means the address "was DPV confirmed for both primary and (if present) secondary numbers", though "A value of Y does not necessarily imply that USPS delivers to that address".
• S means the street number was confirmed and "the secondary number information was present but not confirmed", so the suite you were given was not confirmed.
• D means the street number was confirmed and "the secondary number information was missing".
• N means neither confirmed.

In the UK, Royal Mail's postcode finder searches by part of an address or a postcode, and carries a caution: "Postcodes are not intended to pinpoint an exact geographical location".

A geocoder turns the address into a point on a map. The US Census Bureau's geocoder is explicit about its limits: its address ranges "include all possible structure numbers even though actual structures may not exist", and "Coordinate results are interpolated, or approximated". A geocode places an address on a street. It does not show that a building stands there.

An address can also exist on paper before anything is built. Royal Mail offers a Not Yet Built file of "postcodes and addresses for properties that are under construction or in the planning stage".

Each kind of place leaves its own signs.

Premises the business occupies show its name: signage in street imagery, its own listing on a map, photos of staff and stock, and customers who mention visiting.

A home shows as a house or a flat in imagery, and the county's property record usually describes a residential property.

A mailbox store can show up in the USPS lookup. USPS defines a Commercial Mail Receiving Agency (CMRA) as "a private business that rents Private Mail Boxes (PMBs) to customers and accepts mail from the United States Postal Service for distribution to their customers". Enter a claimed suite number at such an address and the lookup can return the same number as a PMB, with the CMRA field showing Y. A PMB result shows that the address is a mailbox business. It does not show that the box exists or who rents it. A suite that turns into a PMB is a mailbox.

A virtual office or coworking space can turn up under the provider's own name when you search the address. Google's guidelines for business listings give a working definition: a business that "rents a physical mailing address but doesn't operate out of that location, also known as a virtual office". For its own listings, Google accepts an office at a co-working space only if it has "clear signage", receives customers during business hours and is staffed by the business's own people.

A formation agent's or registered agent's address appears on the filings of many other companies. The UK's Office for National Statistics notes that providing a registered office address is one of a formation agent's services, and that "In some cases, the formation agent can register thousands of businesses at a single address." Companies House's advanced search takes a full or partial registered office address and filters by incorporation date.

An empty plot or a building site shows as bare ground or construction in recent imagery, and the property record may describe vacant land. USPS's address API, though not the free lookup, also carries a vacancy field, described as whether "the location designated by the address is occupied".

The date of an image matters as much as the picture.

Google's help page for Street View explains that "You can find street-level imagery taken at different times from the Street View archives and other contributors", through See more dates, and warns that "Historic imagery isn't available for every place that has Street View." Google Earth can show past versions of a map on a timeline.

Note the date of every image you rely on, and compare it with the date the business says it moved in. Signage for a different business in a recent image is a question. A shopfront with this business's name, seen in images from several years, is strong evidence that it has been there. Imagery of a tall block tells you little either way, because it cannot see which company holds which floor.

Search the full address in quotes, with and without the suite number, and look for three things.

• The provider's own name. A mailbox store or virtual office rents out its address, so a search can return the provider advertising it.
• A crowd. Dozens of businesses giving the same street address with different suite numbers is what a mail-receiving business looks like from outside. Hundreds of companies at one registered office points to a formation agent.
• This business. Whether its name appears on anything at that address that it did not write itself: a map listing, a review, a supplier's page, a local news story.

The property record tells you what kind of building it is and who owns it, which may be a landlord rather than the business.

In the US, the county assessor holds the parcel record. Sacramento County lists among its public records the "owner's name (secured only), property address, mailing address", the "zoning code, land use code" and property characteristics. Access varies: Sacramento says that "Due to privacy concerns owner information is not available online", while Maricopa County in Arizona lets you search by owner name. If the owner is an LLC, our guide to finding out who owns an LLC covers county recorder deeds and following an LLC to the people behind it.

In England and Wales, HM Land Registry offers a free property summary with "the address held by Royal Mail" and "the property description", and a title register for £7 that usually includes "who owns the property".

The kind of property is often the most useful thing the record gives you. A house at an address presented as a warehouse, or vacant land at an address presented as a shop, needs explaining. A commercial building at a mailbox store is what you would expect, and says nothing about the business that rents a box there.

Read the registry's address history. Companies House's filing history records each change as "Registered office address changed from" the old address to the new one, with the date, and Companies House offers free email alerts when a company updates its details, "for example, a change of director or address". In California, an LLC files a Statement of Information within 90 days of registering and every two years after, the form asks for its principal office and mailing address, and plain copies are available online for free. A business that moved from a house to a mailbox last month, just before applying, has a short history at the address it gave you.

Compare every address the business uses. The website's contact page, its invoices, its shipping and returns pages and its packaging can name different places, and the returns address is where goods physically go. A returns address at a warehouse in the same region as the principal office fits an online shop. A returns address in another country, for a business presenting itself as local, does not.

Check the phone number. Does it reach the business, does whoever answers know it, and is it the number on the website and the listings? Notice the hours, too: a business that says it runs from California but answers only during another time zone's working day has something to explain. Before any payment, accounts payable teams should call on a number they already hold, which our guide to verifying a vendor covers.

Look for the business in records other people made over time. Reviews that mention visiting, staff who list the office as their workplace, local news and trade directories place a business somewhere in a way its own website cannot.

The case is a composite. Hollinbrae Outdoor and Tess Hessenby are invented, the domain uses the .example name reserved for documentation, and the phone number comes from the 555-0100 to 555-0199 range reserved for fictional use.

Hollinbrae Outdoor LLC applies to a payments platform to take card payments for its online shop at hollinbrae.example, which sells camping stoves and lanterns. The application gives a Sacramento street address with Suite 214, the phone number +1 916 555 0172, and its founder, Tess Hessenby.

The address. The USPS lookup confirms the street address, returns Suite 214 as PMB 214, and shows the CMRA field as Y. The address is real and belongs to a mail-receiving business, so Suite 214 is a private mailbox there.

The place. Street imagery from April 2026 shows a row of shops with a mail and shipping store at that number, as do images from 2022. Searching the address returns the store's own listing and about forty businesses giving the same street address with a suite number.

The registry. Hollinbrae filed its articles in California in March 2023. Its Statements of Information from 2023 and 2025 give the principal office as a house in Elk Grove, the mailing address as Suite 214 and a registered corporate agent for service of process. So the business told the state where it is run from, and the application gave its mailing address instead.

The home. Sacramento County's parcel information for the Elk Grove address describes a single-family house, which fits a business run from home.

The operation. The website's returns page gives a third address, a West Sacramento warehouse run by a fulfilment company whose own website says it stores and ships stock for online shops. Hollinbrae's marketplace reviews go back to mid-2023 and mention orders arriving within two days in California. The phone number reaches Tess Hessenby, who says she runs the business from home, keeps stock at the fulfilment warehouse and uses the mailbox so that her home address is not printed on invoices and parcels.

Put together, the address on the application is a mailbox. The business appears to be run from the founder's home, with its stock at a fulfilment warehouse nearby, and three years of reviews fit a small online shop. The team in this case approves the account, records the principal office and the warehouse as the operating locations and the mailbox as the mailing address, and asks for a recent invoice from the fulfilment company. It arrives the next day, showing an account in Hollinbrae's name.

Two things stay open, and the file says so. The invoice is the merchant's own document, and the team has not confirmed with the fulfilment company that Hollinbrae is a client. Nothing it found shows how much stock is held there. It schedules a review after the first 90 days of processing.

Count only independent evidence. A website that copies the registry's address is the same claim made twice.

• Real but empty premises. A short lease on a small office or a coworking desk with a sign passes the imagery and listing checks. Reviews, staff and customers over time are what show whether anyone works there.
• A borrowed address. Someone can give the address of a real warehouse or office that belongs to another business. The imagery and property record then look right, so check that the name on the building is this business's, and call the premises on a number you found yourself.
• Gaps in postal data. The Commercial Mail Receiving Agency flag says only whether the address "was found in the CMRA table", in the words of USPS's API documentation. A search of the address that turns up a provider's name answers what a missing flag leaves open.
• Old imagery. A business that moved in after the latest images, or one that has left, is invisible to them. Google says it "can't commit to a specific timeline for updates."
• A self-written footprint. A website, a listing and a few reviews can all be written by the business itself. Records made by other people, over years, are harder to produce.

Most of what makes an address look odd has an ordinary explanation, and a fair review checks it first.

• Working from home is common. In 2025, 35 percent of employed people in the US did some or all of their work at home on days they worked, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• Mailboxes and agents can protect privacy. The UK government's guidance suggests that anyone who does not want their home address on the register use "the address of an accountant or solicitor" or appoint "an agent who will give you an address to use", and California's form reminds an individual agent that their name and street address are "a public record, open to all (as are all the addresses of the LLC provided in filings)".
• Formation agents are an ordinary part of starting a company. In the UK, the ONS says "It is common for new businesses to use a formation agent", and an agent's address on the register is often the result.
• New businesses are thin. The Census Bureau puts business applications in September 2026 at 534,947, seasonally adjusted, and projects that 29,022 of them will form businesses with a payroll within four quarters. A young business with no staff is ordinary.
• Imagery and records lag. An image may be years old, and a filing shows the address on the date it was filed.
• Geocodes are approximate. A pin in the wrong place on the street is usually the geocoder, which interpolates along address ranges.

Keep three levels apart. A thin record means look further. A contradiction, such as a principal office that is a house when the application describes a warehouse, calls for a question. Two independent records that agree settle what they cover, and the file records what they leave open.

Checking an address by hand means moving between postal tools, imagery, filings, property records and the business's footprint. Sixtyfour's agent starts from what you already have, such as a company name or a website, researches public sources such as registry filings, public records and the web footprint, links what it finds to the right company and people, and returns every finding with its source. Anything it could not establish is reported as open, and a person on your team decides. There is more on how financial crime teams use it on our financial institutions page.

Treat a business address as a claim, and confirm it exists with postal data before anything else. Then work out what kind of place it is from dated imagery, a search of who else uses it and the property record. Finally, check whether the business operates there against its registry history, its own website and shipping addresses, its phone number and the records other people have made about it, and record what stays open.