How Florida Sunbiz Daily Files Work (and How to Pull New LLC Leads)

Florida’s Division of Corporations (Sunbiz) does not only offer a click-through business search. It also publishes daily corporate bulk files over a public SFTP service. Those files are the practical source for “who formed an LLC in Florida today” style lead lists — if you treat the feed the way Florida documents it.

This post walks through how those official daily files work, what they are not, and how I pull structured new-formation leads from them.

What Sunbiz actually publishes each business day

Per Florida’s Daily Data documentation, the date in a daily filename is the date records were entered into the state database. That batch date is not automatically the entity’s original formation date.

Each daily corporate file is a fixed-width dump of corporate filings added that day. Official field layout and codes live in the Corporate File Definitions. Florida also states that some filing kinds — including annual reports and address changes — are not included in these daily downloads.

Important consequences:

• A daily file can contain filings for entities whose original formation date is older than the batch date
• “Everything in today’s file” is not the same as “every newly formed Florida LLC”
• Source-reported status in the snapshot can change after the file is published

If you want new LLC / new corporation leads, you need an explicit formation filter — not just “download today’s file.”

Daily-file date vs formation date

Two dates matter on every row:

Concept	Meaning
Daily-file / batch date (sourceFileDate)	When the record was entered into the state database and included in that day’s SFTP file
Formation / original file date (fileDate)	The entity’s original formation date as reported by Sunbiz

A defensible “new formation” export keeps only rows where those two dates match. That is the difference between a daily administrative batch and a same-day formation lead list.

Filing-type codes you will actually see

Official codes in the corporate feed include:

Code	Meaning
FLAL	Florida limited liability company
FORL	Foreign limited liability company
DOMP	Domestic profit corporation
FORP	Foreign profit corporation
DOMNP	Domestic non-profit corporation
FORNP	Foreign non-profit corporation
DOMLP / FORLP	Domestic / foreign limited partnership

Older marketing aliases such as DOMLC / FORPRO are not the codes the current daily files emit. Parsers and filters should prefer the official codes above (and normalize legacy aliases if you still accept them as input).

For Florida LLC prospecting, FLAL is usually the starting filter.

What a useful lead row looks like

From the official bulk layout you can typically recover:

• Document number
• Entity name
• Source-reported status
• Filing type
• Daily-file date and exact source file path
• Original formation date
• Principal and mailing addresses
• Registered agent name and address
• Up to six officers / managers (plus a flag when the record reports more)
• FEI/EIN when the public record includes it
• Up to three annual-report year/date slots when present in the bulk record

Treat every field as administrative evidence from that snapshot, not as certified current standing, ownership proof, or KYB identity confirmation. A blank FEI/EIN field does not prove the entity has no EIN.

Daily export vs live name search

This is the most common product mix-up:

• Daily files answer: “What corporate filings did Florida publish in this batch / date range?”
• Live registry search answers: “Does this specific company name or document number exist, and what does the portal show now?”

They are complementary. Daily files are excellent for fresh-formation monitoring and prospecting. They are the wrong tool when a workflow needs to look up an arbitrary existing entity by name across Florida — or across many states.

For multi-state name/ID lookup against official registries, I use US Business Entity Search instead. Keep Florida daily leads and multi-state entity search as separate steps in the same pipeline rather than pretending one actor does both jobs.

How I pull the leads

I maintain Sunbiz Florida Business Leads as a thin wrapper around the official sftp.floridados.gov public bulk feed. It does not scrape the live Sunbiz HTML portal, and it does not use proxies, CAPTCHA bypass, or private credentials.

Safe defaults for new-formation prospecting:

{
  "startDate": "2026-07-17",
  "endDate": "2026-07-17",
  "filingTypes": ["FLAL"],
  "activeOnly": true,
  "formationOnly": true,
  "maxResults": 10
}

What those flags mean in practice:

• formationOnly=true keeps only entities whose original fileDate matches sourceFileDate
• activeOnly=true keeps source-reported Active rows from that snapshot
• filingTypes: ["FLAL"] scopes to Florida LLCs
• An explicit unavailable daily-file date returns no rows instead of silently substituting another day
• Blank/default dates may walk backward to a recent published business day (weekends, holidays, and publication lag are real)

Sample-shaped output (illustrative):

{
  "documentNumber": "L26000161070",
  "name": "EXAMPLE CONSULTING LLC",
  "status": "Active",
  "filingType": "FLAL",
  "sourceFileDate": "2026-07-17",
  "sourceFilePath": "doc/cor/20260717c.txt",
  "fileDate": "2026-07-17",
  "stateCountry": "FL",
  "principalAddress": {
    "street1": "123 MAIN STREET",
    "city": "ORLANDO",
    "state": "FL",
    "zip": "32801"
  },
  "registeredAgentName": "DOE JANE",
  "officers": [
    {
      "title": "MGR",
      "name": "DOE JANE",
      "city": "ORLANDO",
      "state": "FL"
    }
  ]
}

Live pricing on the actor is a small per-run minimum plus $0.002 per dataset item. Keep maxResults intentional on wide date ranges.

Reliability notes (qualitative)

A few operational details matter more than marketing copy when you depend on an official daily feed:

• Download directly from the documented public SFTP path rather than reverse-engineering the website
• Prefer official filing codes and the documented fixed-width layout
• Separate batch date from formation date in both the schema and the buyer-facing defaults
• Retry transient initial SFTP connection failures; skip dates Florida has not published yet
• Stream and early-stop once the formation filter has enough matches, instead of always materializing the entire daily file first
• Never silently swap in another day’s file when the caller asked for a specific date that is missing

Those are boring reliability improvements. They are also what keeps “new LLC leads” claims honest.

Good uses — and hard limits

Good uses

• Daily Florida LLC / corporation prospecting for banking, insurance, accounting, payroll, legal, and other B2B services
• Formation-trend research by date and filing type
• Enrichment of records you already tied to the same Florida document number
• Monitoring newly published Florida corporate filings on a schedule

Hard limits

• Not a live name/document-number search of the Sunbiz portal
• Not certified good-standing or identity verification
• Not complete for annual reports / address-change traffic Florida excludes from the daily downloads
• Not a substitute for multi-state KYB lookup when the subject may be registered elsewhere

When you need current standing or name search across registries, confirm through Florida’s live/certified services and/or run US Business Entity Search for the states that matter.

Try it

• Daily new Florida LLC / corp filings: Sunbiz Florida Business Leads
• Multi-state entity name search: US Business Entity Search
• Official source docs: Daily Data · Corporate File Definitions

If you are building Florida new-business outreach or formation monitoring, start from the official daily file — and filter formations explicitly — instead of treating every row in the batch as a brand-new LLC.